Legalised ball tampering need of the hour but can cricket avoid its repercussions

Legalised ball tampering need of the hour but can cricket avoid its repercussions

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Football is a simple game at the core. The style of football may have changed over time but the core of it remained the same. However, unlike the beautiful game, Cricket reached the crescendo only to evolve further and the memories of the past hold no value in parlance with the way it is played now.

There have been a lot of reasons for the same - the unseen commercialisation, the advent of one new format after another and the rise of freelance cricketers were not even dreamt of upon until the last quarter of the 20th century. So when we talk about Sir Don Bradman in the same breathe as Steve Smith, there has been a sense of incorrectness. Even two modern-day greats Virat Kohli and Sachin Tendulkar, who shared the same dressing room for close to five years, are to be weighed on two different scales because “hey, the eras are different”.

In those differences, lies the need to stand out and chalk out a plan for making the sport a better experience. The changing dynamics of the content consumerism has forced the cricket boards to look for alternatives but the peripheries have demanded subtlety to be removed. For instance, the ongoing discussion surrounding the usage of saliva on the ball in the wake of Coronavirus pandemic has thrown a cat among the pigeons, with ESPN Cricinfo reporting that the ICC might allow legalised tampering of the ball to restrict the chance of virus infection. 

Among the things, leather moisturiser, Vaseline, wax and shoe polish react better for the shining of the ball as a substitute for saliva, but many experts believe that it would never be able to do so. For instance, Ashish Nehra was critical of the move, saying substances like Vaseline can never be a replacement for saliva and sweat when it comes to shining the ball while adding that the product doesn't even ensure conventional swing. It is 100% possible that it might do better or worse, but that would mean bringing one more problem in lieu of solving one. Science says that both sweat and saliva are heavy enough to make one side of the ball heavier for reverse swing, making the game a fair exercise. 

During England's tour of India in 1976-77, English pacer John Lever was alleged to be using Vaseline on the ball to help it swing. While the then English captain Tony Greig explained that Lever and Bob Willis used the substance on gauze to counter the excessive heat of Chennai but the Vaseline-mixed sweat from his brow made its way to the ball, only to infuriate Indian captain Bishan Singh Bedi, who found it at the base of the stumps and handed over to umpire Judah Reuben. Giving an explanation nearly 31 years after that, another pacer from the side, Mike Selvey, who is now one of the widely-travelled and most-respected cricket journalists in the UK, alleged that Bedi used the inadvertent mistake to save his floundering captaincy reign as the tour remained one of the most controversial India-England series of all-time. 

As the 2018 Cape Town Ball Tampering scandal brought the focus back to it, reverse swing has always been a dark art, equally done by skill as much as it is by the usage of outside substances. Former English opener Marcus Trescothick admitted in his autobiography that he was given the role by team management to use mints to shine the ball to produce more swing. Wasim Akram, Waqar Younis, Sachin Tendulkar, and Rahul Dravid have all been accused of tampering at least once. But boy did most of them get away with it!

Ball-tampering, till date, remains one of the most overrated crimes in the sport, being picked and shown by the host broadcasters. Surely, the punishment has always been due but the sustained moral policing? The harsher judgement that was dished out to Steve Smith, David Warner, and Cameron Bancroft shed a light on the drama, stigmatising a crime that thrives on its inaccessibility. 

The impact of it is still strong but the legalisation will remove a black mark from a thing that could never equate to other crimes of the sport like fixing or doping. So if the tampering law, at all, passes in the ICC Cricket Committee meeting, then this will be a welcome change to remove a taboo from the sport. However, while adaptability has been the key to Cricket being a marketable force in the 21st Century, it is left to be seen if the fans can stay away from judgements or not filth the Twitterverse with their armchair opinion about the moral side of it. 

In the fear of history repeating itself, the ICC needs to take the step in a cautious manner, examining both sides to come up with a conclusion. Of course, health remains the top priority and the unique challenge that the world throws at us is not a simple thing to discuss. Can an outside substance be used in a way that would truly replace saliva and sweat, or will it just end up as another gimmick to make it an even-more batsman-friendly sport? The ball is in the ICC and MCC’s court to deliver the eventual output?

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