While Test batters have never scored faster than they do now, cricket’s rate of play across all three formats verges on meandering. MIKE ATHERTON pitches a solution.
Arms folded, scowling, chance slipping away, Brooks Koepka did not think much of the pace of the play during the final round of the 87th Masters. He’s an instinct player, is Koepka, a grip-it and rip-it type who likes to get on with things. Who knows how much the go-slow ahead upset his rhythm on that final, unsuccessful day, but close to five hours for a two-ball round was not to his liking.
Patrick Cantlay was ahead of Koepka and although he is not the slowest player on the tour, he is slow. “The group in front of us was brutally slow. Jon [Rahm] went to the bathroom like seven times during the round and we were still waiting,” Koepka said. By his own standards it was a mild rebuke, but a rebuke nonetheless. At least he wasn’t playing behind JB Holmes, thought to be the most, shall we say, deliberate player around.
The pace of play is a hot topic in all sports and has become so in cricket – ironically as the game has quickened up like never before. Counterintuitively, while batsmen score more quickly than ever in Test cricket, the game has never felt more ponderously attended to by the players. It is a rarity to see the full 90 overs bowled in the allotted time, except perhaps in the spin-friendly subcontinent. The shortest format of the game – T20 – is, by minutes per over, also the slowest.
This has become painfully apparent in this year’s Indian Premier League. Since the start of the tournament, Jos Buttler has sent out three tweets. Two of them have been after victories for his team Rajasthan Royals – nondescript congratulatory messages for the supporters – while the other was about the pace of play: “Let’s speed up the pace of play,” he told his fellow competitors last week. Like Koepka, Buttler prefers to do things in a hurry.
It was not difficult to see why he was so frustrated, watching the match between Chennai and Lucknow, as others must have been. A stray dog delayed the start – hardly the officials’ fault admittedly; the first ball of the second over then went for five wides, prompting a delay while the fielding captain called for a review under the impression the ball had clipped the pad. Another interminable delay followed, so that six legal deliveries had taken the best part of ten minutes after the scheduled start of play.
IPL matches are slated to last three hours and 20 minutes but they often meander on for up to four hours. With every ball carrying meaning in a T20 match, captains are more deliberate about field settings in this format than any other. There has also been the creeping influence of DRS, which now enables captains to challenge virtually any umpiring call, including wides and no-balls, and, of course, there are the tactical time-outs, or ad breaks, which stretch an innings even longer.
The IPL is the game’s premier domestic tournament; it continues to draw fabulous crowds, rates fantastically and is, now, the second-most valuable television property per game in the world. The pace of play seems barely relevant. But the general lassitude in T20 has seeped into the longer formats, where there is more at risk and where spectators are often asked to fork out much larger sums for a ticket. An Ashes seat is the golden number this summer, with commensurate prices, but how often will spectators see their full 90 overs?
Ian Chappell, the former Australia captain, criticised the general pace of play recently in an article for ESPN Cricinfo. The subjects of his ire were captains who take too long setting fields, batsmen who are not ready when the bowler is, and umpires who fail to keep the game moving by allowing unscheduled stops for things such as drinks and changes of gloves. This last development is a particular bugbear and umpires rarely use their authority in this regard to keep the game moving.
“Surely people don’t switch on their devices or go to a ground to watch cricketers adjust their gloves every ball, chat with their batting partner in the middle of an over, change gloves regularly or down unofficial drinks,” Chappell wrote.
“These can possibly be decreed health measures or might be purely down to superstition, but they often completely ignore the etiquette of the game. Umpires must be given licence to insist that players don’t purposefully waste time. In turn, the umpires should be backed to the hilt by the judicial system. All players should be made aware of their obligation to the public; they deserve a fair day’s play for what is often an expensive outing at the cricket,” he added, reasonably.
Chappell is an avid baseball watcher who played to a good standard in his youth and will have kept an eye on the way that sport has speeded up this year, having been put on the clock. Like cricket, baseball has suffered angst about the length of the game but has tinkered at the edges, rather than invent new formats, to shorten games while trying not to alienate its core audience.
Major League Baseball introduced a pitch clock in the spring, having trialled it in the minor leagues. Pitchers get 20 seconds to release the ball when the bases are loaded and 15 seconds when they are not. Batters get eight seconds to be ready to face the pitch, otherwise a strike is called against them. In the minor leagues last year, the games were quicker by an average of 25 minutes and in the opening 76 nine-innings games this year, they were shorter by 26 minutes on average. There have been no concessions to the quality of play.
Test cricket is, in so many ways, far more thrilling than it has ever been, with England leading the way under Ben Stokes. But spectators are regularly short-changed and it is unarguable that there is a lot of faffing about from players in between or during overs.
All the clock has done in baseball is remove a lot of “dead” time. More awareness from the players and umpires in cricket about how easy it would be to do the same would be welcomed by everyone.
Originally published as Mike Atherton: Time to put cricketers on the clock, just like they do in baseball