Dan Jones: Cricket is missing the point with new scoring system

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10 May 2016

Walking through Battersea Park with my seven-year-old on Sunday, we stopped to watch a game of cricket. It was past five o’clock but the sun was still warm. A run-chase of sorts appeared to be taking place but we didn’t pay that very much attention. We just stood and enjoyed the simple progress of the game: filthy weekend medium pace being delivered to batsmen who swiped at it like they were shovelling coal.

The sky was blue, the grass was green, the caps were red, the whites were white. The park was fragrant with blossom and lukewarm rose wine. It was pure sensory joy.

After studying the match for a while, my child asked how this strange game worked. And so began one of the most difficult conversations of parenthood: Explaining The Rules of Cricket.

Harder than rationalising the death of a goldfish, more self-evidently absurd than explaining the belief system connecting the crucifixion of Christ with the Easter bunny, and nearly as awkward as that thing you’re supposed to do with the condom and the banana; it is basically the discussion you hope mummy will deal with.

No such luck. I began with boundaries, progressed to “reasons for changing ends after every over” and dribbled to a rather lame finish with “and there’s a thing called leg before wicket but we’ll go into that next time”. The look on my child’s face suggested that next time will not be very soon coming.

Of the many criticisms we could level against the noble sport of cricket, “lacking a complex scoring system” is not one. Indeed, the game’s wilful complexity is its chief barrier to entry, albeit one that is transformed in the minds of the converted into a perverse source of satisfaction. Human beings who prefer simplicity to subtlety and certainty to unpredictability (children, say, or Americans) tend to recoil from this gnarly and difficult sport. You would not sit down and design cricket. You would come up with baseball.

Anyway. I mention all this because I have been reading with increasing irritation about the proposed experiment with applying an overarching points system to the various series to be played between England and this summer’s two touring sides, Sri Lanka and Pakistan.

Such a system, which awards four points for winning Test matches, and two for 50-over and 20-over games, aims to connect the results of the three formats to determine an ultimate victor of the tour. It has been used in the women’s Ashes, in which only one Test match is played, in the interests of creating a meaningful series. For the ladies this makes some sense. What does not make sense is throwing it at the men’s game.

The drive to adopt this scoring structure seems to follow from a wish among cricket’s administrators for greater jeopardy in the game, joined to an infantile desire to make a ‘story’ out of everything. Thus, an ODI between England and Pakistan on a Wednesday at the Rose Bowl cannot simply be enjoyed for what it is: a game of cricket with its own intrinsic significance and flow. It must be explicitly placed in — and I wish we would ban this rank phrase from sporting chatter — ‘the narrative’.

That thinking patronises cricket fans. And the method — of bolting yet another scoring system onto a sport that created Duckworth-Lewis — seems likely only to put off those who find the game unnecessarily convoluted in the first place.

It also fails to comprehend what makes cricket exciting, which is not manufactured situations and more rules. It is brawny lads like Ben Stokes smashing good bowling out of the ground. It is nuggety accumulators like Alastair Cook running up record scores during hours of stubborn concentration. It is Jimmy Anderson or Stuart Broad bending a red ball around a lamppost at 87mph.

Cricket at its best is art and not science. It is music and not mathematics. When it can be enjoyed by a seven-year old who does not care to fully understand then it is working. If it requires the calculator on your iPhone to work out the appropriate level of enjoyment then it is broken. Let this curious game remain, please, as it was before: pointless.

JT: THE CAPTAIN, LEADER… THE END?

Farewell, then, John Terry. If indeed it is farewell, the Chelsea captain left the stage with a bang, being sent off against Sunderland and therefore banned for the rest of the season. The wrong sort of bang, maybe, yet somehow fitting for a player who managed to be simultaneously one of the most and least impressive in Premier League history. After 703 games, the Captain and the Leader looks like he is now, merely, a Legend: a story to scare the kids with before bedtime.

KHAN PAYS A HEAVY PRICE

Amir Khan has been hailed as a brave man for fighting Saul ‘Canelo’ Alvarez. But there is a point at which fighters should be protected from their own bravery, and this was one. Khan was lucky not to be more seriously hurt by a puncher so much bigger and stronger than himself. And the inevitable result of this kamikaze bout has plainly set back once more Khan’s increasingly directionless career. He is going back down to welterweight. He should never have left.

IT LOOKS GAME OVER FOR PLATINI

Michel Platini’s resignation as president of Uefa serves, he says, his wish to continue attempts to clear his name. But the verdict of the Court of Arbitration for Sport hardly suggested that the process will be easy. He remains banned from football, albeit for four years rather than six. When he is free to return, the game will hopefully be rather different. What place then for a man who, despite his protestations, is now so deeply linked to the bad old days of Sepp Blatter’s regime?

Dan Jones: Cricket is missing the point with new scoring system

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