Cricket champs make me spit
It is hard to know which is the less absurd competition. The cricket World Test Championship or Cricket Spitting at Purdue Bug Bowl. One involves nine teams not all playing each other to a set of rules that no-one understands. The other involves gobbing a thawed insect without accidentally biting off parts of its anatomy.
I think, if given the casting vote, I’m ticking the cricket-spitting box in the ballot paper. At least the rules are relatively simple. Brown house crickets are to be used weighing between 45-55 milligrams, you have 20 seconds to spit and must not leave the spitting circle before the judges have authenticated the spit by checking to see that the six legs, four wings and two antenna are still intact.
You might wonder why the cricket has to remain intact. It is because some devious competitors will chew off limbs to reduce wind resistance. In the view of the officials, who are dressed in white, thigh-length coats of the sort you might find at Lord’s, that sort of behaviour ‘‘just isn’t cricket.’’
Well, it all sounds enormously sensible to me, and should any tree-hugging entomologists be upset at the ‘inhumane’ treatment of these inhuman crickets, I can reassure you that these little critters have already passed away, been cryogenically preserved, and then melted for the tournament.
Don’t try this at home but, oh well, if you have to, Dan Capps, the world record holder (possibly former, but there is not a mountain of literature on the sport) from Madison, Wisconsin, offers this advice: ‘‘You have to expectorate the cricket headfirst, in a spiral. It’s just a matter of blowing hard. We’re talking about a limp, dead thing that doesn’t give you any assistance. It isn’t very aerodynamic.’’
It seems to be a bit harsh to talk about cricket as a limp, dead thing, but you have to concede the possibility that the expectorating Yank has a point. I mean what is it with this new World Test Championship. Has the ICC gone completely mad?
All right, I know that raises another point. Can you go mad if the evidence suggests that you are already mad? After all this is a council that continues to let fast bowlers chuck ball after ball at people’s heads without doing anything about it.
At the test between New Zealand and England at Mount Maunganui there was an international incident because one idiot is reported to have made a racist remark at Jofra Archer. Do we deplore that and hope we would have stepped in had we been bystanders? Well, duh, yes.
But meanwhile nothing is said about England’s policy of trying to smash Kiwis on the head. Archer is a seriously dangerous bowler and sconced both Mitchell Santner and BJ Watling. If this carries on, sooner or later we are going to have another tragedy on the scale of Phil Hughes. And yet the ICC and its umpires do nothing. Neil Wagner is another who tries to maim batsmen. And apparently, heaven help us, that is cricket.
So you can see why some of us may think that the ICC is one of the least responsible governing bodies in the world of sport, and that is setting the bar pretty darn high. And it is this bunch of kooks who came up with the format for the World Test Championship. Actually it’s the ICC World Test
Championship. Look at us. We’re going to put our name to it, just in case someone tries to copy it. As if.
It won’t have escaped your attention that New Zealand recently crushed England in a test match. That had to be good news because India were running rampant at the top of the World Championship table with 360 points. That is just 26 points less than the combined totals of the other eight teams.
But the Kiwis must now have closed the gap, right? Well, no, wrong, right, because their test series against England doesn’t count. You see New Zealand don’t play England or South Africa. Er, but they have just played England. Yes, but it doesn’t count.
In fact lots of games don’t count. This is because India and Pakistan won’t play each other. This goes back to partition and the subsequent history of war and terrorism. Except these two countries play one another in the World Cups of reduced over competitions. And they have played before at neutral venues like Sharjah and Toronto.
Five years ago the two countries agreed to play six bilateral series. But then they couldn’t reach agreement over venues and took their toys away. Sorry, but isn’t this the sort of stuff that the ICC is supposed to sort out. Every team could have played each other if the ICC had brokered a neutral venue between India and Pakistan to play a two-test series and told them to get on with it.
But they didn’t get round to it. So you have a skewed competition where a country like Australia is penalised because it doesn’t get to play two of the two weaker teams (West Indies and Sri Lanka). And New Zealand don’t get any points for beating England.
You also need to be Alan Turing with the Bletchley Park bank of brains and computers in order to crack the scoring system. Home and away tests count equal points which quite a few captains don’t agree with. You get docked points for slow over rates. And then, because all the series aren’t over the same number of matches, you take a total of 120 points and divide it by the number of tests in the series.
But tied tests are worth half that total of points and drawn tests are worth a third of the total number of points. And in case any of us is still interested, the final will be played at Lord’s some time in the next decade. If two teams are tied at the end of the league stage on both points and series won, then the team with the higher runs per wicket ratio will be ranked higher. The runs per wicket ratio is calculated as runs scored per wicket lost, divided by, runs conceded per wicket taken. Sorry, what’s the number for Bletchley Park again.
It’s madness, of course it is. The Victorians came up with a few goofy schemes and we’re still at it in our curious human way. Finland hosts a wife-carrying championship. The sport of shin-kicking goes back centuries in England. There’s toe-wrestling and tunathrowing and underwater hockey.
In Castillo de Murcia in Spain men dressed as the devil jump over rows of new-born babies laid out on mattresses. It’s sort of Pope Evel Knievel III. The origin does lie in the cleansing of original sin, apparently. And no, Israel Folau and Raelene Castle have not been invited to compete next year.
But wacky though this all undoubtedly is, in a sort of glorious homo sapiens way, the test championship is all, well, just a bit sad. It’s been skewed by money and TV companies and two countries who still can’t find a way to shake hands over a game.
So I might just give the final in 2021 a miss. The true home of cricket is in Indiana. I’ll be making my way to Purdue, US of A, for the hurly burly of cricket spitting where the men in white coats gather in a bowl to deal with gobby people who are just a bit fantastically sane.