Adam Zampa speaks to an umpire after attempting a ‘Mankad’ dismissal of Tom Rogers during the Big Bash last week.Adam Zampa speaks to an umpire after attempting a ‘Mankad’ dismissal of Tom Rogers during the Big Bash last week.Last modified on Mon 9 Jan 2023 09.21 GMThe latest iteration of the laws of association football is 26,868 words long. Despite having to deal with variations for sevens and 10s, rugby union manages to deal with its laws in 22,480.
This is the part of cricket’s laws that specifically deals with the possibility of one fielder standing on the shoulders of another, or perhaps being tossed into the air like a gymnast from a human pyramid, while both are outside the field of play, collecting the ball, and being carried back inside the rope before returning to earth and claiming to have taken a fair catch.
The image conjured by the following paragraph is better still. Here we learn that “a fielder who is not in contact with the ground is considered to be grounded beyond the boundary if his/her final contact with the ground, before his/her first contact with the ball after it has been delivered by the bowler, was not entirely within the boundary”.
to dismiss Jordan Silk and remind the world of the absolute absurdity that is Law 19.5.1 subsection five.at the non-striker’s end – Mankaded, if you will – because the bowler’s arm had gone beyond the vertical before he turned to knock off the bails , a nuance that the bowler himself, Australia’s Adam Zampa, 30-year-old veteran of 148 international matches, had previously been completely unaware of.
If anything could be seen even more clearly than the floodlit handshakes as play ended unsatisfactorily it was that, however long cricket’s laws already are, they remain very much unfinished. Perhaps that committee should expedite its return to their fusty wood-panelled room in St John’s Wood, and, ideally, be a bit more serious this time.