Cricket is just bloody grand, and over a billion fervent adherents worldwide are united in hurling hard leather spheres at each others’ shins. Unforch, that’s often not the only thing hurled at players of the gentleman’s pass time, and hectic verbal and racial abuse on the pitch continues to feature in the sport.
Understandably, The Marylebone Cricket Club, aka the czars of cricket’s laws and spirit, are done with it. So done, in fact, they’ve looked to the other great 11 vs. 11 sport for inspiration for their plans to test “red cards” over their upcoming summer season.
ABC reports several uni’s and academies under the MCC umbrella will be testing the on-the-spot punishments – with actual cards – to see if the card system has any benefits over the current retrospective punishments doled out to offenders.
That’s where it gets really interesting: on top of the five run penalty, if a batsman commits one of these more serious offences they’ll be retired, not out. Otherwise, they could be sent off for ten overs or 20% of the remaining innings’ total.
Provisions for offensive language come into play in Tier 3, with penalties for:
“Using language or gesture that offends, insults, humiliates, intimidates, threatens, disparages or vilifies another person on the basis of that person’s race, religion or belief, colour, descent, national or ethnic origin, age, disability, gender, sexual orientation or background.”
Lord’s states “whilst the majority of cricket is played in a competitive but fair spirit, there are some players, or even teams, whose behaviour is below what is expected for cricket.” If these punishments are found to curtail that dickheadery, they might just be added to the sport’s upcoming 2017 amendment to the Laws of Cricket – the biggest change to the game since the transformative limited overs format.
Source: ABC.
Photo: Morne De Kierk / Getty.
