'The wrist is a forgotten area of spin bowling'

By Scott Oliver in Cricinfo

Former England offspinner Pat Pocock recalls his career: escaping rioters in Guyana, being mentored by Jim Laker, and captaining Sylvester Clarke


Pat Pocock (left), as Surrey's deputy president in 2014, presents certificates to members who had been with the club for 60 or more years © PA Photos



Taking seven wickets in 11 balls was a complete freak. Every time they nicked it, it went to hand; every time they played across the line, they were out lbw; every time it went in the air, it was caught. I can honestly say that I bowled much better in a match against West Indies in Jamaica, on a rock-hard wicket that was like marble and with a 55-yard boundary straight, when I bowled 50-odd overs and got 0 for 152. Every player in our side came up to shake my hand in our dressing room because I bowled so well.

Colin Cowdrey was a lovely man, a fine player, but he was not the strongest of characters and was very, very easily influenced as captain.

If I had to choose between sidespin and bounce, I'd pick bounce every time.

I played in Manchester against a very strong Australian side - Bill Lawry, Ian Chappell, Doug Walters, Ian Redpath, Bob Cowper, Paul Sheahan, Barry Jarman - a fabulous side. I bowled 33 overs, 6 for 79, and I'm left out the next game. I'd just turned 21. I thought: what way is that to bring on a young spinner? They brought Derek Underwood in.

John Woodcock said that the three people in the world he'd seen that enjoyed the game the most were Derek Randall, Pat Pocock and Garry Sobers.

A few years ago a guy came up to me and said, "I've got a night at the Royal Albert Hall in September. Do you fancy doing the opening spot?" It was blacked out, with two pin-spot lights into the middle of the stage. "Ladies and Gentlemen, please welcome former Surrey and England cricketer, Pat Pocock." I walk out - 3000 people there, black-tie job - and sang "For Once in Your Life" by Frank Sinatra. That gave me a bigger buzz than playing in front of 100,000 at Eden Gardens.

Getting knocked out by Unders was no crime, but in those days he was nowhere near the bowler that he became. In those days, they used to have the Man-of-the-Match awards split into two parts: bowler of the match and batsman of the match. Basil D'Oliveira won the batsman of the match and I won the bowler of the match [in Manchester]. We come to the next Test at Lord's and we were both left out of the side.

Jim Laker and Tony Lock were great bowlers, but the thing that made them even greater was, they bowled on hugely helpful wickets. Not only uncovered wickets but underprepared wickets as well. They turned square. They were masters of their craft, but even more so because of the pitches they played on. You had Laker and Lock, [Alec] Bedser and [Peter] Loader - great bowlers, bowling on result wickets, backed up with good batting, and because of that, Surrey won seven championships on the trot.



"The most unfortunate thing about my career was that I didn't play a single Test match between the ages of 29 and 37" © PA Photos





I got Sobers out nine times, but never in Test matches. I'd have liked to have got him out in a Test match.

I went over to Transvaal, only for one season, just to see the country. I enjoyed it enormously. The cricket was very strong; a bit lopsided - I didn't see many spinners - but lots of quick bowlers and batsmen.

A great big thick stone hit Tony Lock on the back of the head in Guyana [in 1967-68]. We'd just won the series and the crowd were rioting. Gold Leaf, the sponsors, were providing transport. I was with Locky and John Snow, and when the car eventually got through the crowd, there was a hail of bricks and sticks and pebbles and all sorts. We got in and the driver put his hand on the horn and drove straight at the crowd, with everyone leaping out of the way. We got about 100 yards before we stopped in the middle of more rioters throwing missiles toward the ground, thinking the players were still there. We were actually right in the middle of them, and we all slipped down under the seats and carried on.

The best three players I bowled at were Richards, Richards and Sobers. Barry first, then Viv.

I was one of the bigger spinners of the ball in the country. I used to bowl "over the top", so I made the ball bounce a lot. If you put spin and bounce, with control, into your skill set, then you're going to do well on good wickets.

The most unfortunate thing about my career was that I didn't play a single Test match between the ages of 29 and 37. If you interview any spinner that played for a long time, they'll tell you those were their prime years. When I was in the best form of my life, I didn't get picked.

I never got out as nightwatchman for England, and I'm quite proud about that.

Day in, day out, in county cricket, Fred Titmus was the best offspinner I ever saw. He was a fantastic bowler, with control and flight and a good swinger. But in Test matches, because he wasn't a big spinner of the ball - and bearing in mind you played on pitches that were prepared for five days, not three - you didn't often have to worry about Fred.

Since I was about five, I can't ever remember thinking I wanted to do anything else except play cricket. But all I was at five was keen. It was only about 12 when I thought perhaps I had a chance of playing professionally.



Pocock is congratulated for taking a wicket in Barbados, 1967-68 © Getty Images





I was very lucky. If you think that the average person in the England side today has probably played between 70 and 100 first-class matches - I played 554, so that's quite a lot.

I had four people who helped me on my way up: Laker, Lock, Titmus and Lance Gibbs. Among them they had 7500 first-class wickets. I had lots of help and advice. Who have the players got today? Is it surprising we've barely got a spinner good enough for Test cricket?

Mike Brearley was the best captain I played under, but the person I most enjoyed playing under was David Gower, by far. When I played under David, I'd had over 500 first-class matches. He knew that I knew more about my bowling, and offspin bowling generally, than he would ever know, so he just let me get on with it. I didn't want to have to fight my captain to get the field I wanted.

The most important part of your body for deceiving the batsman in the flight is your wrist. The wrist is a forgotten area of spin bowling.

When I was first picked for England I was very much aware that there were a lot of senior players around. There haven't been too many times in English cricket history when there were more great players in the side: Colin Cowdrey, Kenny Barrington, John Edrich, Geoff Boycott, Tom Graveney, Jim Parks, Alan Knott, John Snow.

Dougie Walters was a very difficult player to bowl at for a spinner.

I was Titmus' understudy. He was a quality bowler, but on that [1967-68 West Indies] tour he didn't bowl very well. I played against the Governor's XI, virtually the Test team, and got six wickets for not many runs. Then I played against Barbados, who had nine Test players in their side, and got another six wickets. Suddenly all the press are writing: Is Pat Pocock going to get preferred to Fred? I thought I might be in line for a debut, and then of course he had the accident.

Apart from Illy [Ray Illingworth], there's no other offspin bowler who's played more first-class matches than me.

Playing in Madras in '72-73, I bowled a slightly short ball to Ajit Wadekar, who got back and cut it for four. Next over, I bowled another one, slightly short, turned slowly, and again he cuts it square. I said to Tony Lewis, the skipper, "I want a man out on the leg side in the corner." He said, "But he's just hit you for two fours square!" I said, "I know, but I'm not going to give him any more balls to hit. I'm going to bowl a stump straighter and a yard fuller, but if I do, I want that fielder out there." He started to grumble and shake his head. It was his third Test match and I'd played a couple of hundred first-class matches. I said, "Don't argue. Just f****** do it. I've got a reason."

The best offspinner I've ever seen, on Test match wickets, was Gibbs, because the spin and bounce he got were second to none. He'd always hit the shoulder or splice of the bat.



Pocock sings to spectators after a county day's play at The Oval © PA Photos





I didn't ever want to play for any other county, but if I had done, I'd have liked to have played for Glamorgan - not only because I was born in Wales but when you play for them you feel as though you're playing for more than a county. You feel as though you're playing for a country.

Sylvester Clarke was the most feared man in world cricket. Viv Richards went into print saying he didn't like facing him. Viv says he didn't wear a helmet. He bloody did: he wore one twice against Surrey when Sylvester Clarke was playing. Fearsome, fearsome bowler. I played against Roberts, Holding, Daniel, Garner, Marshall, Patterson, Walsh, Ambrose - all of them. I faced Sylvs in the nets on an underprepared wicket, no sightscreen, no one to stop him overstepping. There was nobody as fearsome as Clarkey was. And everybody knew it.

I captained Surrey because I felt I had to. I'd done it 11 years before I was given the official captain's job. I enjoyed the game too much and I didn't want anything to take my enjoyment away. But I looked around and thought there was no one else who could do it. We came second, which isn't too bad, although I did have a guy called Sylvester Clarke up my sleeve.

Laker became a good friend. We worked together on commentary. He didn't come up to me and say, "You've got to do this, you've got to do that", but a few times a situation would arise and he'd come up and make a suggestion.

In the first two-thirds of my career, The Oval was a slow, nothing wicket. You could hardly ever, as a spinner, get the ball to bounce over the top of the stumps. A nightmare. It was the slowest thing you could possibly bowl on. If it did turn, it hit people halfway up the front leg. Then they relaid all the surfaces and it went from one of the slowest, lowest pitches to this rock-hard thing that didn't get off the straight. We even had a stage with Intikhab [Alam] playing and he couldn't get it off the straight. Sometimes we played county games twice on the same pitch to try and get it to turn.

Greigy [Tony Greig] was the only player in the side who'd have done that [run out Alvin Kallicharran in Guyana]. Umpire Douglas Sang Hue had no option but to give him out. He hadn't called time and he hadn't picked the bails up. There were a few in the side that thought it was beyond the pale, but no one said it. Sobers told Greigy he should leave the ground in his car with him, otherwise he might not make it back to the hotel in one piece.

In Karachi, the students burned down the pavilion while we were still inside. The match and tour were called off.



"I I never got out as nightwatchman for England, and I'm quite proud about that" © Getty Images





Tom Graveney playing a T20 game would be like entering a Rolls-Royce in a stock car race.

I got 1607 wickets and John Emburey got 1608, both at 26 apiece, but he bowled 2000 more overs to get that wicket. His home ground was Lord's, which, in those days, was an infinitely better place to bowl spinners than The Oval. He was a fine bowler, but he was defensive and I was attacking, and on some wickets I felt I had the edge over him.

One year, Boycott had got 1300 runs in nine innings. We were playing Yorkshire at Bradford, and I had Graham Roope on Boycott's shoelaces on the off side, right on top of him. I ran up, bowled him off stump. As he walked past Roopey, he said, "I can't play that bowling, me." Roopey told me that, and I said, "Roopey, that ball did absolutely nothing. It didn't drift, didn't turn, he just played inside the line."

As soon as I'd played representative cricket for England Schools - I used to bat No. 5 - I thought I might have a chance.

Kenny [Barrington] was a selfish player, but anyone who played like he did was always going to be more consistent than someone like Ted Dexter. He used to restrict himself to three shots, and that's why he didn't get out, whereas Ted played every shot in the book. Kenny's going to be more consistent, but Dexter will win you more games.

Closey [Brian Close] got one run in 59 minutes [at Old Trafford in 1976] and had the shit knocked out of him. He was in a terrible state when he came in. I got in as nightwatchman in the second innings and I didn't get out that night. Next morning, I'm walking out with John Edrich and he asked me, "Which end do you fancy?" I told him I'd have Andy Roberts' end as he was a bit of light relief. John pisses himself laughing: "I tell you now, if Andy Roberts is light relief then we've got problems."

-----Further inputs from Pat Pocock when asked what he meant by the use of the wrist in spin bowling:

Firstly, my comment was in relation to left and right arm finger spinning, not wrist spinners as that is an entirely different technique.

When Monty Panasar was current, every pundit & journalist said “Monty has to bowl with more variation” – it was totally obvious. If we say for example that the majority of spinners vary their pace from, say 50 – 64 mph, this is not done with merely lobbing the balls up on the slower deliveries. A great exponent of what I was saying was Bishen Bedi. Bish could vary his pace with almost the same arm speed every ball. He did this by sometimes holding his wrist back and other times for pushing his wrist in hard behind the ball. Change of speed without any deception has little effect – it’s when a bowler makes the player arrive at his shot too early, or makes then jab the ball out when it’s a quicker ball, is what variation is all about. This is very important when trying to make the batsmen mis-read the length of the ball.

Bowlers need to get the basics of their action first, most importantly the smoothest rhythm they can manage – then, this gives them the ability to bowl the same ball time and time again, sometimes under pressure, and maintain control. Once they have learnt this………then they can experiment with their wrist…… in the nets?

Spin bowling is almost a forgotten art mainly because players and coaches have so much less experience in playing and teaching it!! When we don’t produce spin bowlers in County cricket the batsmen also suffer from opportunities to learn a technique against spin bowling. Some of our England batsmen in India will be on a vertical learning curve this winter I fear!!
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The poppy has become a symbol of racism – I have never worn one, and now I never will

Robert Fisk in The Independent


Yes, the boys and girls of the BBC and ITV, and all our lively media and sports personalities and politicians, are at it again. They’re flaunting their silly poppies once more to show their super-correctness in the face of history, as ignorant or forgetful as ever that their tired fashion accessory was inspired by a poem which urged the soldiers of the Great War of 1914-18 to go on killing and slaughtering.

But that’s no longer quite the point, for I fear there are now darker reasons why these TV chumps and their MP interviewees sport their red compassion badges on their clothes.

For who are they commemorating? The dead of Sarajevo? Of Srebrenica? Of Aleppo? Nope. The television bumpkins only shed their crocodile tears for the dead of First and Second World Wars, who were (save for a colonial war or two) the last generation of Brits to get the chop before the new age of “we-bomb-you-die” technology ensured that their chaps – brown-eyed, for the most part, often Muslims, usually dark skinned – got blown to bits while our chaps flew safely home to the mess for breakfast.

Yes, I rage against the poppy disgrace every year. And yes, my father – 12th Battalion The King’s Liverpool Regiment, Third Battle of the Somme, the liberation of burning Cambrai 1918 – finally abandoned the poppy charade when he learned of the hypocrisy and lies behind the war in which he fought. His schoolboy son followed his father’s example and never wore his wretched Flanders flower again.

Oddly, the dunderheads who are taking Britain out of the European Union on a carpet of equally deceitful lies – and I include Theresa May and her buffoonerie of ministers – are guilty of even greater hypocrisy than the TV presenters whose poppies, for just a few days a year, take over the function of studio make-up artists (poppies distracting viewers from the slabs of paste on their TV faces). For the fields of Flanders, the real mud and faeces and blood which those vile poppies are supposed to symbolise, showed just how European our dead generations were.
British soldiers went off to fight and die in their tens of thousands for little Catholic Belgium, today the seat of the EU where Nigel Farage disgraced his country by telling the grandchildren of those we went to fight for that they’d never done a day’s work in their lives. In France, British (and, of course, Irish) soldiers bled to death in even greater Golgothas – 20,000 alone on the first day of the Somme in 1916 – to save the nation which we are now throwing out of our shiny new insular lives.

The Entente Cordiale which sent my father to France is now trash beneath the high heels of Theresa May – yet this wretched woman dares to wear a poppy.

When Poles fought and died alongside British pilots in the 1940 Battle of Britain to save us from Nazi Germany, we idolised them, lionised them, wrote about their exploits in the RAF, filmed them, fell in love with them. For them, too, we pretend to wear the poppy. But now the poppy wearers want to throw the children of those brave men out of Britain. Shame is the only word I can find to describe our betrayal.

And perhaps I sniff something equally pernicious among the studio boys and girls. On Britain’s international television channels, Christmas was long ago banned (save for news stories on the Pope). There are no Christmas trees any more beside the presenters’ desks, not a sprig of holly. For we live in a multicultural society, in which such manifestations might be offensive to other “cultures” (I use that word advisedly, for culture to me means Beethoven and the poet Hafiz and Monet).

And for the same reason, our international screens never show the slightest clue of Eid festivities (save again for news stories) lest this, too, offend another “culture”. Yet the poppy just manages to sneak onto the screen of BBC World; it is permissable, you see, the very last symbol that “our” dead remain more precious than the millions of human beings we have killed, in the Middle East for example, for whom we wear no token of remembrance. Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara will be wearing his poppy this week – but not for those he liquidated in his grotesque invasion of Iraq.

And in this sense, I fear that the wearing of the poppy has become a symbol of racism. In his old-fashioned way (and he read a lot about post-imperial history) I think my father, who was 93 when he died, understood this.

His example was one of great courage. He fought for his country and then, unafraid, he threw his poppy away. Television celebrities do not have to fight for their country – yet they do not even have the guts to break this fake conformity and toss their sordid poppies in the office wastepaper bin.

In Brexit Britain, being a foreigner marks me out as evil

Joris Luyendijk in The Guardian

I realised it only after having done it. On Tuesday I was watching my kids playing with other children in a London park. I was about to call out to them when I intuitively caught myself. Having lived here for most of their life, my children speak flawless English. I, however, have a clear Dutch accent. Yelling to them would suddenly single them out as foreigners to the other children. Only six months ago none of this would have occurred to me. Now I find myself lowering my voice.

Something is rotting in England and the Brexit referendum result seems to have given the rot a boost of oxygen. The problem is not that a majority of English people or their government are racist or xenophobic; they are not. The problem is that those English people who are racist seem to think they have won the Brexit referendum and that now is open season. The government is doing precious little to counter this impression, while the powerful tabloids are feeding it, day in day out.

Yesterday’s Daily Mail splash was a new low. Featuring nine small photos of lorry drivers on their phones, the tabloid claims to have caught “17 foreign truckers using their phones at 50mph”. The key word here of course is “foreign”, establishing an unconscious link in people’s minds between “foreign” and evil. The Daily Mail has been at this for a long time, with my personal “favourite” its front page about “EU killers and rapists we’ve failed to deport”.

Recent research suggests that humans are predisposed to “learn” negative stereotypes. Our brains are more likely to remember negative information than positive information, especially about groups of whom we already hold negative views. Such a harmful cognitive feedback loop would call for extra caution when reporting, making sure ethnicity or religion is included only when relevant to the story. “Foreign lorry drivers using their phones while driving” does not pass that test, unless you believe English drivers never use their phones on the road.

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“Foreigner”. When I came to live here five years ago that word felt so different from how it does today. Britain was the country that would give the governorship of the Bank of England to a Canadian – try to imagine Germany making a non-German head of the Bundesbank. London’s financial sector, where I had come to do research, was teeming with European immigrants telling me that it was in the City that for the first time ever they no longer felt like a foreigner. “It’s like they don’t see my skin colour,” a French-Algerian, Turkish-German or Surinamese-Dutch banker would say with genuine emotion. “It’s all about what you can do here, not how you look or where you are from.”

Fast forward a few years and a woman of Polish origin goes on BBC Question Time to say she no longer feels welcome in Britain. The audience boos her, proving her point better than she ever could. This is now a country where a minister calls for firms to publish lists with the “foreign” workers they employ, and where another government ministry tells the London School of Economics to no longer put forward any of its “foreign” academics for consultancy work on Brexit. Those two statements were rescinded, but the same is not true of another, made by a minister who described UK-based EU nationals such as me as among Britain’s most valuable bargaining chips in Brussels.

Meanwhile, the Daily Express and the Daily Mail seem to compete for the most outrageous incitement against migrants, refugees, “foreigners”. Indeed, in some quarters of England today, calling somebody “foreign” is enough to win the argument. The European court of justice? The European court of human rights? Well, they are staffed by foreign judges, so case closed.

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It is strange how these things get under your skin, when you realise that for millions of tabloid readers you are a “foreigner” rather than a fellow European. It suddenly feels significant that in the English language “foreigner” and “alien” are synonyms. When I have to fill out a form for the NHS, having to choose between “British white” and “Any other white” no longer looks so innocent; the same with schools having to report their pupils’ racial and ethnic backgrounds.

When I now see somebody reading the Daily Mail I can’t help thinking: why would you pay money to read invented horror stories about people like me? I am a supremely privileged middle-class Dutchman who can always return to his homeland – an even more prosperous place than England. But what must it be like for a 13-year-old UK-born girl of Kosovan descent growing up in Sunderland?

Usually a piece like this concludes with a sanctimonious warning of what history tells us xenophobic incitement ultimately leads to. But we are well past that. Jo Cox is dead. Hate crime figures have soared. Some people simply seem to have taken the Daily Mail at its word: our country is flooded by evil foreigners. The politicians are in cahoots with them. Who will speak for England?

Television killed the umpiring star

Kartikeya Date in Cricinfo

At its annual general meeting in July, the ICC decided to reduce the margin of the umpire's-call element in the Decision Review System. The old rule required that at least 50% of the ball must be hitting at least 50% of a stump in the estimate provided by the ball-tracking model. The change, which comes into effect this month, now requires at least 50% of the ball to be hitting any part of a stump, or, as the ICC phrased it: "The size of the zone inside which half the ball needs to hit for a Not Out decision to be reversed to Out will increase, changing to a zone bordered by the outside of off and leg stumps, and the bottom of the bails (formerly the centre of off and leg stumps, and the bottom of the bails)."




The umpire's call has traditionally invited the scorn of a number of prominent players as well as commentators. The rule change is a victory for the view that umpire's call is excessively deferential to the umpire. In this essay, which extends ideas I have written about previously, I consider what this change says about the past, present and future of umpiring.

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Contradictions abound with the DRS. It was invented, according to the ICC, to correct obvious umpiring mistakes. But it is used most frequently to litigate on marginal umpiring decisions. The purpose of the player review was to allow players to question umpiring decisions where they knew the umpires had got it wrong. Yet players routinely use the review speculatively, to see if they can get a marginal reversal. The DRS was invented because umpires were deemed to be experts who made clear (or obvious) mistakes from time to time. It was not intended to make up for any perceived shortcoming in an umpire's expertise. It was intended to make up for the human tendency to make mistakes in real time. This distinction is important.

If an umpire lacked expertise, then no matter how many times he or she saw a particular lbw appeal, the right decision would not be reliably reached. But if an umpire simply made a mistake in real time, it would be recognised on replay. As an analogy, think of the times where you have made a mistake adding up two numbers. This is a mistake. It does not occur because you don't know the correct way to add two numbers. If you didn't know how to add, no matter how many times you looked at the problem, you wouldn't know how to reliably calculate the correct answer.

The DRS was not intended to make up for any perceived shortcoming in an umpire's expertise

Not only is the DRS only rarely used for this kind of correction, the process used to identify mistakes - the player review - fails about 75% of the time. At the 2015 World Cup, 583 umpiring decisions were made (including 312 lbw and 229 catches): an umpiring decision is made any time an umpire answers an appeal, so not all dismissals involve umpiring decisions and nor do all umpiring decisions result in dismissals. Eighty-four were reviewed and only 20 of those were successful; 57 reviews were for lbw appeals, of which only eight were successful. According to data provided by the ICC, in all international cricket between April 2013 and March 2016 in which the DRS was used, one in six umpiring decisions was reviewed by players. Three out of four player reviews failed. Umpiring decisions on lbw appeals were reviewed more frequently - about one in every four. Four out of five such reviews were unsuccessful.

Many players, as well as TV commentators, often betray a misunderstanding about the DRS, beginning with the basic question of what it is. In cricket the umpire can choose between two options when answering an appeal - out and not out. The DRS is a system for reviewing the umpire's answer. It is not a system for providing a new answer to the original appeal by setting aside the umpire's first answer.

The DRS is also frequently the catch-all term for the suite of technologies used within the review system, technologies that are also not well understood. The most widespread misunderstanding is about ball-tracking and the notion that the estimate of the path of the ball from pad to stumps is not an estimate but a statement of fact. This is particularly puzzling, since it suggests that players and commentators misunderstand the lbw law. A leg-before decision is built on the umpire hypothesising about an event that never occurs, that never occurred and never will occur.

----Also read

Abolish the LBW - it has no place in the modern world

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The question that must be answered on an lbw appeal is: "Had the pad not been in the way, would the ball have gone on to hit the stumps?" The answer to this question is not knowable in the same way as the answer to "Did the ball touch the edge of the bat?" In the case of an edge, the event occurs. The DRS includes technologies that enable an answer to this inquiry. No comparable data can possibly be available in the case of lbw. The estimate of the ball-tracker is just that: an estimate. This is why marginal cases, where the estimate contends that the ball is clipping the stumps, are classified as umpire's call. The probability of an estimate being wrong by an inch is exponentially lower than it being wrong by a quarter of an inch. The point of umpire's call is simply to ensure that only those decisions that can be refuted should be overturned. All other decisions should be allowed to stand.

The rise of the DRS is tied in to the way the authority of the umpires has been undermined by players and broadcasters over the years Cameron Spencer / © Getty Images

Yet, even Kumar Sangakkara evidently misses this point. Perhaps he was caught up in the disappointment of the moment - his former team-mates had just been denied an lbw thanks to a review by the England batsman when he tweeted: "High time the ICC got rid of this umpires [sic] call. If the ball is hitting the stumps it should be out on review regardless of umps decision." Later he added: "is a feather of a nick marginal if it doesn't show up on hotspot but only on snicko? Then why use technology." Sangakkara is not alone in misunderstanding that when an lbw review returns umpire's call, the ball-tracking estimate is telling us: "This may go on to hit the stumps, but it cannot be said with sufficient certainty."

Now it is true that what the ball-tracking companies consider to be sufficient certainty and what the ICC considers to be so is not the same thing. Different providers use different methods for predicting the ball's path. They are also not equally confident about the reliability of the predictions. Ian Taylor, the head of Virtual Eye, has previously suggested that TV umpires be given an override switch that allows them to ignore the ball-tracking estimate in certain circumstances. Paul Hawkins, of Hawk-Eye Innovations, is far more confident of his company's ball-tracking predictions.

But if we take the criticisms of Sangakkara, and Shane Warne and Ian Botham among others, to their logical conclusion, then by eliminating the umpire's call, and with it the idea of the marginal decision itself, there is no longer any need for the umpire. If the review is for the appeal and not the decision, then why is the decision necessary in the first place? Why make umpires stand in the sun for six hours if their expert judgement, from the best position in the house, is not needed?

Why not use only DRS technologies instead of an umpire? Almost every single thing the umpire does on the field can now be done from beyond the boundary. The umpires could sit in a nice air-conditioned office in the pavilion with a dazzling array of screens and controls. They could even operate the electronic scoreboard from there, instead of signalling boundaries and extras to the scorers.

A leg-before decision is built on the umpire hypothesising about an event that never occurs, that never occurred and never will occur

One practical answer is that these technologies are expensive. We will still need umpires at the lower levels. But without the incentive of being able to become an international umpire, what might happen to the quality of umpiring at the lower levels?

As a scientific matter, if one is to consider replacing the umpire with such technologies then the responsible thing to do is to consider two kinds of error. First is the margin of error of the technology itself. Take the ball-tracker. The amount of information available for each delivery is not exactly the same. For instance, the faster the delivery, the fewer the number of frames of video available from which the path of the ball can be traced. And because the same amount of data is not available for each delivery, all projected paths cannot be predicted with equal certainty.

This is not to say that most paths cannot be predicted with sufficiently little uncertainty. In an interview in 2011, Hawkins explained that the accuracy of the prediction is more binary than one might imagine. There is either sufficient data for a reliable prediction or there isn't. One example of a situation where there isn't sufficient data is for yorkers. The ball-tracking system designates any situation in which the distance between the ball's pitching point and the point of impact is less than 40cm to be an "extreme" lbw. A mistake by the ball-tracking system in an lbw review involving Shan Masood about two years ago may have been due to this condition.

Before ball-tracking, the decision against Masood could have been argued two ways - one, that the ball was very likely to miss leg stump, and the other, that Masood had moved a long way across and was hit on the back heel inside the crease. The ball did not have much to travel. This would have introduced doubt into the idea that the ball would have missed the stumps.

If we eliminate the idea of umpire's call, and with it the idea of the marginal decision itself, is there a need for the umpire?Richard Heathcote / © Getty Images

In the ball-tracking era, with the increased number of mini-decisions in the chain between the original appeal and the final decision, there are more points where people can make mistakes than before. What's more, there are more people who can make mistakes. The Masood lbw did involve operator error according to Hawk-Eye. The upshot of all this is that the cricketing question of whether or not the decision against Masood was reasonably defensible was set aside in favour of doubts about the plausibility of the ball-tracking estimate.

Hawk-Eye did once suggest visualising the confidence of each prediction by drawing an "uncertainty ellipse" around the ball. In cases where there was sufficient information to make the prediction, the ellipse showing a calculated error would be extremely close to the ball. Showing the ellipse, however minor the error might be, would continually remind viewers of two facts: first, that the animation they were watching was an estimate, and second, that the estimate was probabilistic. This was rejected by broadcasters, who preferred a "definitive" visualisation.

I am inclined to accept that the mathematical prediction models are generally reliable. As more testing is carried out, and with advances in hardware, these models will continue to improve. But even if we assume that the model is good, and its least confident prediction is still sufficiently confident, we also have to make allowances for shortcomings - those factors it is not designed to account for. I am not referring to atmospherics, or the peculiar traits of a cricket ball at different stages of its existence (the model's solution of tracking movement has an elegant way of accounting for these). Instead I refer to, for instance, the limits of video - the path of the ball from the bowler's hand to the batsman is constructed using multiple video frames from multiple tracking cameras; or the non-standard nature of cricket stadiums, which could introduce limits to the extent of calibration possible; or the difference in the quality of video available in different countries.

Every city in the world that requires the certification of building designs before construction requires that concrete structures be "over-designed" to include a factor of safety. This is usually a matter, for example, of increasing the calculated beam depth for a given span by a certain percentage. This is done to cover for uncertainties that the calculation cannot take into account. The umpire's call is similar.

****

Connoisseurs and administrators have dreamed of using technology to help umpires for decades. But the development of the DRS is not solely the result of an innocent, abstract desire to help umpiring. Its evolution is a direct consequence of the authority of the umpire being undermined by players, aided and abetted by broadcasters. It was not inevitable that technical assistance for umpiring decisions should take the form of a review initiated by players. Nor was it inevitable that the very technologies used to enhance the entertainment value of the television broadcast should become tools of adjudication.

Umpires are right to be fearful. Their authority has been systematically dismantled from the commentary box

The very design of the DRS betrays its impulses. If the point of the system were to correct obvious mistakes, why would such sophisticated technologies be necessary? Shouldn't an obvious error, by its definition, be obvious? Instead, it appears that a central impulse was to ensure that the very technologies that were used by broadcasters to litigate umpiring decisions be used in the review. Given the pressure the umpires had been placed under, it would not have been viable to use a system of reviewing decisions that did not include these technologies.

Consider now examples of the oldest form of review - requesting replays for run-out calls - to see how umpires have begun to question their own expertise. Matters have reached a stage where they reflexively draw a TV screen in the air even for the politest, mildest appeals, where it is patently clear the batsman is in. The replay often shows him well inside the crease, or even past the stumps. There are arguments to be made for being safe rather than sorry, but there are instances when umpires signal for the replay even as the batsman is walking off to the pavilion. This is motivated by fear, not caution.

And umpires are right to be fearful. Their authority has been systematically dismantled from the commentary box. To see why, we must understand the model of the TV "argument", the central feature of which is balance, not accuracy or depth or nuance (which lead to complexity, which is boring for TV).

If one person takes the position that the earth is flat, and the other that the earth is round, then a "balanced" argument treats both positions to be equally valid. Here's how it might happen during commentary. An important batsman is given not out at a crucial stage. One commentator makes an effort to explain why the decision was marginal and why it might have reasonably gone either way, that the umpire did not make a mistake. The co-commentator, either by way of "balance", or in an attempt to live up to a TV persona, responds by saying he thought it was out and the fact that it was not given is a mistake. One side concludes the earth is round. The other disagrees. If there is time, they have a "debate", which usually amounts to the two claims being restated in different ways until time runs out.

The "balanced" argument comes with the following corollary in cricket commentary - as long as an umpire is praised for getting a decision right, it is perfectly reasonable to excoriate him for getting a decision wrong. The rightness and wrongness of marginal decisions is, by definition, doubtful. But the manufactured certainty of a visualisation like the ball-tracker enables a thorough excoriation, minimising marginality. One commentator will offer the careful, nuanced live commentary. The other will see the ball-tracker depicting the ball clipping leg stump and say, "This is where umpire's call saves the batsman despite a bad original decision." Of course, if the ball-tracker shows the ball missing by a whisker, the same commentator will praise the original decision. The difference between the two stances is often no more than a fraction of an inch. There is no cricketing merit in having such divergent opinions about instances separated by fractions of an inch, but it makes for great TV; never mind that it undermines the authority of the umpire.

Under the DRS not only are there more points where people can make mistakes than before, there are more people involved in the process, who can make mistakes © Getty Images

Too many commentators seem willing to accept the idea that a decision is worth reviewing just because a player does not like it. If not, the vast number of bad player reviews would bother them at least as much as the marginal lbw decision going against their team seems to. They don't. You never hear of how consistently unsuccessful players are at reviews. That's one statistic commentators rarely track.

Their job precludes them from saying "It could reasonably have gone either way" too often. That response makes everybody but the most serious cricket fans deeply unhappy. And if only serious cricket fans watched cricket, elementary economics says that it would not interest most broadcasters. The point is not that commentators are inherently bad. That matters are not as simple as this is palpably evident from the fact that the same commentators sound different depending on the broadcaster they work for. Rather, the point is that the DRS is the product of the complex interplay of cricket and the lucrative show business of its broadcast. Commentators constitute the high-profile face of the show-business side and usually have a deep history on the cricketing side, and hence are central characters.

As conclusion, here is an idiosyncratic history of umpiring, told through three umpiring decisions and their presentation. It constitutes a prehistory of this latest change in the rules. On the fourth evening at Adelaide Oval on a day late in 1999, Sachin Tendulkar was given out lbw after ducking into a Glenn McGrath bouncer. The ball didn't rise on a wearing, pre-drop-in-era wicket. Ian Chappell and Sunil Gavaskar were on commentary, and after describing the action, Chappell said:

"Dangerous lbw decision for an umpire to give because there are so many moving parts. It's not like the batsman being hit on the pad. There's a lot of movement when the batsman's ducking like that. It's hit him up under the back of the arm. [Pauses as the ball leaves McGrath's hand and reaches Tendulkar] Oh, it's not the easiest decision to give at all. Because with all those things moving, you've got to be very sure."

Gavaskar was interested in why Tendulkar chose to duck. He pointed out that the short leg probably worried Tendulkar and made him choose not to play at the ball. Chappell and Gavaskar had been discussing, even before the appeal, how ducking was likely to be risky given the uneven bounce. There was no Hawk-Eye. But between the video and the commentary, it was clear to the viewer what had occurred. Australia had set a trap and it had worked. The decision McGrath won was bold but reasonable. It was possible to reasonably disagree with Daryl Harper, but it could not be successfully argued that he was definitely wrong.

Too many commentators seem willing to accept the idea that a decision is worth reviewing just because a player does not like it

Nearly 12 years later in Mohali, Tendulkar against Pakistan in a World Cup semi-final. In the 11th over of India's innings, Saeed Ajmal got a ball to grip and turn past Tendulkar's forward defensive. On commentary, even as Ajmal and Kamran Akmal were seized by the appeal of their cricketing lives, Sourav Ganguly's instinctive reaction was that it looked very close. Sure enough, umpire Ian Gould gave it out.

It was a perfectly reasonable decision. Any umpire who made the same decision could not be faulted. But here was a wrinkle. The ball-tracking estimate showed that the ball would have missed leg stump by what seemed to be a few angstroms. This time the intimately intertwined apparatus constituted by the umpires and the broadcast told us simply that Gould was wrong and Tendulkar was safe. Leg-before decisions were no longer reasonable judgements by human beings. Ganguly's instinctive reaction on commentary was lost amid the manufactured certainty. Cricket's broadcast no longer had time for the subtle idea that close appeals are close because they are close to being out, while close decisions are close because they are more or less equally close to being out and not out.

Four years later, during the knockout stages of the 2015 World Cup, we, the viewers, were finally allowed into the inner sanctum. While a review was in progress, instead of hearing commentators, we heard what the umpires said to each other.

"Let's look at the no-ball. Yes, that looks fine."

"May I see spin-vision when you are ready?"

"Let's see the ball-tracker when you are ready."

"Pitched outside leg."



The ICC's rulebook governing the DRS prescribed these questions. The role umpires were playing could have been played just as well if they were all sitting in a room in front of a television; in the age of the DRS, the umpire has gone from being the expert match manager to all-purpose match clerk. On its own, the change in umpire's call is not the worst idea, even if it is an unnecessary change. But it is a signal that a bad argument has won - another milestone towards the end of the umpire's expertise.

Tarek Fatah - A Moses for Indian Muslims?

Girish Menon

I do not sign in to You-tube under the assumption that my preferences will not be known to Google. Yet, whenever I visit the channel I am nudged to watch at least two new videos of Tarek Fatah. This could mean that despite my best efforts Google knows my preferences and tries to keep me happy by suggesting videos of a person I agree with. Could it also mean that Tarek Fatah is a growing Indian phenomenon and may lead Indian Muslims to discard the mullah and embrace secularism? Could it also mean that I am dreaming?

I have been reading and following Tarek Fatah’s writing and speeches for over five years now. When I first came across his work he appeared on Canada’s Rawal TV and had authored the work “The Jew is not my enemy”. Today, he appears to be a permanent fixture on Indian TV channels and is the envy of most aspiring politicians and godmen.

Tarek Fatah “an Indian who was born in Pakistan” is a Canadian citizen. He says that the definition of India or Indianness (Hindustani) cannot be restricted to the current political borders while continuing to ignore the Indus Valley civilisation and the historical cities of Lahore, Kesh and Nankana Sahib.

He is highly critical of Indians who badmouth Gandhi and Nehru while praising Jinnah. According to Fatah, Jinnah was a pork eating Shia, elected from a Muslims only constituency of Mumbai, who espoused the cause of the Nawabs of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. Jinnah helped the state of Kalat negotiate independence from the British, got rewarded in his weight in gold, and then after Pakistan became free, sent in troops to annex what is now the troubled province of Baluchistan.

He is critical of Nehru and Abul Kalam Azad for not allowing Kalat and the North West Frontier province to join the Indian state despite them being much closer to the Indian border than erstwhile East and West Pakistan. He feels it is India’s responsibility to help resource rich Baluchistan (Kalat) break free from the yoke of Pakistan and to become a free country.

Another anathema to Fatah is the mullah. He feels that Indian Muslims have to make a clear choice between Allah’s Islam and Mullah’s Islam. Allah’s Islam is based on the Quran alone which was a revelation to God’s messenger Prophet Mohammed. Mullah’s Islam, on the other hand, which includes the Hadiths and the Sharia, is a view of the various aspirants to power who used Islam as a political ideology to control people. The mullah in India, like Hindu Brahmins, have ascribed to themselves the role of the sole agent of God and the interpreter of the religio - political legacies. The mullahs along with vote-bank politicians use this power to keep Indian Muslims, especially women, subjugated.

To me, I have been disturbed by some of the developments in history since the fall of the Soviet Union especially the rapid rise in ‘religious movements’ the most prominent being the Islamic one. I have been on the lookout for rationalists and secularists with Islamic sounding names and Fatah was the first one I encountered. I do hope that Fatah can lead a renaissance among Indian Muslims and thereby nudge Indian Hindus to move towards a more secular position as envisaged in the constitution. Power to you Tarek Fatah.

Tarek Fatah vs Rabbani

In Urdu.

If economists want to be useful again they need to redeem themselves

Allister Heath in The Telegraph

Imagine that you kept getting it wrong, not just a little, but completely and utterly.

When times were bad you thought they were good, and when they were good you thought they were bad. You argued against successful solutions, and in favour of failed ones. You predicted a rise when in fact a fall materialised; to add insult to injury, you clung to your old ways of thinking, refusing to change apart from in the most trivial of ways. In normal industries you would be finished: your collection of P45s would fill half a drawer, and you would long since have been forced to retrain into somebody of more value to society.

But not in one profession. Yes, dear readers, I’m referring to the systemic, cultural problems of modern, applied macroeconomics, in the public as well as private sectors, where failure continues to be rewarded.

Economists who make all the wrong calls keep their jobs and big paychecks, as long as their faulty views echo the mainstream, received wisdom of the moment. I spent five years studying economics, and I still love the subject. At its best, economics is the answer to myriad problems, the prism through which to view the vast majority of decisions.

But I’m deeply frustrated with some of its practitioners: all those folk who predicted that the third quarter would see very little or negative growth, when in fact the economy grew by a remarkable 0.5pc, the most important statistic of recent times.

For political and psychological reasons, one small and rather unreliable snapshot had become all-important. Had that (preliminary and approximate number) been in negative territory, or close to zero, the outcry would have been deafening and reverberated around the world. The markets would either have slumped or more likely, bounced back, on the assumption that Brexit would be reversed. Yet the opposite happened, and the economy did well (France grew by just 0.2pc during the same time).

Combined with the news that Nissan will be sticking with the UK, it was a great week for Brexit, made all the better by the announcement of Heathrow expansion. Brexit won the referendum, lost the immediate aftermath, won the next few months and has now won again.

Of course, the war continues, and will do so for years. There are huge challenges looming. But this was the week that the economics profession was further discredited. The forecasts were not just completely wrong – my guess is that they were actually downright harmful, shaving growth in areas where elites that are most likely to be swayed by economists decisions.

Economists have form: most backed the euro, failed to see the financial crisis coming, missed the dot.com bubble and the Asian crisis, loved the European Exchange Rate Mechanism and never understood the Thatcherite revolution.
Previous generations failed just as badly: the vast majority loved Keynesian economics during the 1970s, read and recommended a textbook that thought that the USSR would eventually overtake America, backed corporatism, failed to predict the 1929 crash and provided all of the wrong answers in the 1930s.

One problem is groupthink, another is the inability to be objective. But the biggest problem is a faulty paradigm: a fundamental flaw at the heart of the models and assumptions of the economic mainstream, aided and abated by an academic establishment which excludes dissenters from its journals and top faculties.
So if economists want to be useful again, they should do two things.

First, we need a proper Parliamentary inquiry into the failures of the Treasury model and official forecasting before and after Brexit. There is an argument for this to be extended to the Bank of England and even to the private sector. Economists need to cooperate, if even anonymously: are some under pressure to toe various lines? If not, what is the real reason for such a succession of flawed consensuses?

Second, the real threat to the economy is absurd decisions such as the ruling that Uber drivers should be treated like employees (on the basis that the US firm exerts too much control and direction over drivers, even though they are free to choose their hours and commitment).

If not reversed, this judicial activism will destroy jobs and push up prices; it is a shame that such a good week ended on such a sour note. The Government may need to legislate to make it clear that Uber and other similar enterprises are platforms, not employers. If economists want to redeem themselves, they should explain why flexible markets are good and why it would be a genuine disaster if we kill off the sharing economy with red tape.