The New Cricket
One day cricket is dying fast and should be euthanased swiftly before other forms of the game begin to suffer by association. The game last night between Australia and Pakistan was a case in point, stripped of any competitive interest by half-time. Even the bonus point (introduced to maintain some semblance of tension in situations like these) was conceded without a fight. In the end, the only question was whether or not Michael Clarke would get a century. Ricky Ponting blocked his way through an over to preserve the handful of winning runs for Clarke’s bat, making the whole farce complete, as the commentators vainly tried to pretend that it was interesting. Roy and HG once commented that watching the Australian one-day team play was like watching a man kick a dog that’s tied to a stick. But at least the latter spectacle might have the benefit of pathos.
Whatever the sport, one-sided contests are seldom interesting. But there’s something uniquely tedious about a one-day cricket match where one side dominates. I think it’s perhaps the major weakness in what is a poorly conceived and poorly developed game. Rather than try to renovate one-day cricket into something interesting, the administrators of the game would be better off starting from scratch. At the moment, I think the nascent Twenty20 format is probably being presented as a complement to test and one-day cricket. I think it should eventually replace the one-day game, hopefully after an extended period of thoughtful innovation. I think it’s possible to have a short version of cricket which is exciting and interesting, but it’s going to require a great deal of imagination and a preparedness to abandon many more test cricket-oriented assumptions.
What makes a one-sided ODI more boring than a one-sided test match? It’s the inevitability. Let’s say a team gets bowled out for 100 in the first innings of a test match. Obviously, their situation is pretty dire, but there are still a number of chances for redemption are still there. To begin with, they have time. Teams have, on occasion, turned around startlingly big first-innings deficits to win the game. Time also allows the pitch to deteriorate, which can make the last innings of the match a nervous one even if there’s only a small total to chase. So even if your team goes into the second innings facing a large deficit, they only have bat well enough to gain a small lead and give themselves a chance of bundling out the opposition cheaply on a crumbling pitch. Then, of course, there’s the option of trying to save a match. A tenth-wicket pair mounting a determined rearguard action can frustrate an opposition pushing for victory, and that in itself can add to the tension. A dominant team needs to do more than just exceed the efforts of their opponents - they need to be able to finish things off. This presents a weak opposition with an escape hatch, which can keep things exciting right to the end. Again, there are some heroic examples from the long history of the game.
So test cricket, a five-day game where you’d think the capacity for boredom was heightened, is in fact particularly well-designed to maintain interest. Lots of other games can become a bit dull if one side establishes early dominance, but none are nearly as long as a one-day match. At least if an AFL match is boring, it’s only boring for a couple of hours. Others, like tennis, change in length according to how well-matched the opponents are. A mismatch can be over in an hour, whereas a tight game can go to three or four (or sometimes more).
The trouble with one-day cricket is that, early on in its development, it tried to hedge its bets. It tried to get by on a minimum of innovation so as to maintain the support of test cricket purists (who were never going to like the game anyway), and in doing so cheated itself out of the chance to create a mature, well-crafted game. Test cricket-lite was never going to work, because the appeal of test cricket is tied to the particular length of the game and the conditions under which it is played. Once you strip away the second innings, strip away the chance to save a match, and strip away most of the tactical armoury, and strip away the five-day narrative, you’re left with a game which has lost almost all of test cricket’s innate appeal. One-day cricket was always going to have to stand on its own and be judged as a new game - it was never going to be able to pin its hopes to the shirt-tails of test cricket. The people queuing at the gates of one-day matches were never going to be test match diehards, so it was foolish to put a lid on innovation for the sake of keeping the diehards happy. So we’re stuck with all sorts of test cricket hangovers. The length of the game is one – it would be unthinkable to anyone but a test cricket fan. Also, the basic structure of the game remains, apart from having limited overs. A run is still a run and is achieved in the same way. A four is a four, a six is a six, a wicket is a wicket and you’ve still got ten of them to play with. All of those things fit nicely into the test game, but some of them throw up contradictions in the context of the one-day format.
Wickets, for instance, are problematic in the limited over game. Teams will tend to structure their batting order so as to have a swashbuckling, risk-taking strokemaker at the crease at the beginning of the innings (when fielding restrictions are in place – another clumsy adaptation of test cricket), and another at the end of the innings (when there’s not much to lose if he holes out on a big swing), with more reliable, higher-percentage players in between (to make sure that the team is not bowled out too quickly). But the meaning of this structure is lost if wickets don’t fall at the right intervals. So there can easily come a point in the game where a wicket is beneficial to the batting team. You seldom get that issue in test cricket, where wickets tend to be unequivocally bad.
The way that one day cricket has tried to favour the batsmen, too, has resulted in awkwardness rather than excitement. Narrowing down a bowler’s line until he is effectively bowling at a strike zone might make for more sixes being hit, but it also reduces the contest to a hitting contest. The bowler is really just a peripheral figure in one-day cricket. He could be replaced by a bowling machine without too much impact on the way the game is played (although it would speed up the over rates).
Based on these thoughts, I’ve started to have some idea of a shorter game that I think would be consistently exciting to watch. First of all, the problem of length. That can be dealt with pretty easily by just shortening overs, as in the Twenty20 game, but there might be more creative solutions. What about this idea: Each side bats for 10 overs. If one side beats the other by 50 runs or more, they win and the match is over. If not, then they bat for an extra 5 overs. The margin for victory is now 30 runs. Then another 5 overs, with a 20 run margin. Then another 5 overs, but this time it’s “sudden death”. It would mean that dominant teams would have the incentive to take risks early and put the match away (which would have the added advantage of shortening the game if it’s a mismatch), and even if one team was struggling, there would still be the goal of an interim target for them to reach to take the game into an extra innings.
Next, the problem of wickets. I think it would be best dealt with by changing the meaning of a wicket. Perhaps it could be something like indoor cricket, where each batsman has to bat for a certain number of overs (although not necessarily the same number for each spot in the batting order). The loss of a wicket results in a run penalty, or an extra over for the opposition to bat, or some such thing.
That change could also help deal with the problem of defensive bowling. Rather than just penalise the bowler with no-balls for anything remotely wide of the crease or above the shoulder, bowlers could be properly rewarded for wicket-taking balls. To build excitement and create a more interesting contest between bat and ball, the incentives could work both ways. How about this: When a batsman hits a four, he scores four runs as normal. But the score for that ball remains “open” – he can increase it with the next ball he faces, so the score from the second ball is effectively doubled (like a spare in tenpin bowling). If the second ball is also hit for four, then the first delivery, as well as being doubled, remains “open”, as does the second ball. So say the three balls would normally score 4, 4 and 2, now he’d be scoring 10, 6 and 2. Balls could remain “open” as long as an over continues. So six fours in a row beginning at the start of an over would score 24 20 16 12 8 4, for a total of 84 runs. Great for the batsman, but the catch is this: if he loses his wicket, the score for any “open” ball is reduced to zero (in addition to whatever the other penalty for the wicket is). So the longer the sequence of fours goes on, the greater the incentive for the batsman to attack so as to make the most of his “open” balls, and the greater the incentive for the bowler to attack so as to fix the damage. So let’s say a batsman has hit five fours in a row. A sixth four will result in an additional score of 24 runs; a lost wicket will cost him 60. I think that would be pretty exciting.
The Twenty20 game seems to have generated quite a lot of interest, so I hope that cricket’s administrators take this opportunity to correct a lot of mistakes that they made during the much more ad hoc introduction of one day cricket. I think there’s the potential for a genuinely exciting short form of the game to emerge, but there’s no point in pretending that it’s going to look much like test cricket. When you design a performance motorcycle, you don’t start by trying to make it look as much as possible like a Rolls Royce.
Meaty
I haven’t seen the TV commercial that’s supposed to vilify vegetarians. But this description suggests that if anything, it’s the gung-ho right-wing carnivores, out of whom the piss is being taken, who should be getting offended.
“A balanced Australia Day diet should consist of a few nice juicy lamb chops and beer, and perhaps a bit of pavlova for those with a sweet tooth,” Kekovich says.
“Yet your long-haired, dole-bludging types are indulging their pierced taste buds in all manner of exotic, foreign, often vegetarian cuisine - chicken burger value meals, pizzas, a No 42 with rice.
“It’s an absolute disgrace, and people ask why we need capital punishment.”
[…]
Kekovich even invokes the spirit of Anzac, asking viewers if the diggers were fighting for tofu sausages.
“No. They were thinking of grabbing a lamb chop off the barbie with their bare fingers, sustaining third-degree burns, then sticking their hands in a relieving Esky to fish out a cold one,” he says.
“The soap-avoiding, pot-smoking hippie vegetarians might disagree with me, but they can get stuffed.
“They know the way to the airport, and if they don’t, I’ll show them.”
Of course, it’s an ad for meat, and to that extent I think it’s wrong, but no more wrong than any other ad for meat. If anything, it’s less wrong, because at least it might make the (very occasional) person who is hostile to vegetarianism realise what a dickhead he looks like.
Good Taste & Extermination
My response when I read about the Princy Harry swastika business was similar to Mark Lawson’s and Robert Corr’s. Yes, it was tasteless for Harry to wear a Nazi uniform, just as it’s tasteless (at least) for anyone else to do the same. But the kid’s only young, and I think we’re all entitled to a bit of youthful misjudgement. If he’s not already cringing at his own dumbness, he will eventually.
What caught my eye was the whole “colonial or native” theme of the party. There’s something pretty sick about all those upper-class English kids racking their brains to think of frightfully witty costumes that would take the piss out of their colonial history. I’m not sure that Robert is right when he says that the object of the party was “to celebrate oppression and denigrate the colonised”. I don’t think that your average theme party, however tasteless, is that political. If you have a Tarts and Vicars party or a Devils and Angels party or a Stage and Screen party, you’re not trying to make any kind of statement about the paedophile priests or satanic cults or the decadence of pop culture. All you’re doing is giving people some ideas for costumes.
Having said that, though, I don’t think even Geoff Honnor (who reckons the “colonial or native” thing is all just good clean fun) would draw the line somewhere. A Schindler’s List party perhaps, where everyone comes with shaved heads? A Hotel Rwanda theme (papier-mache machetes the preferred accessory)? I think most people would agree that themes based around genocide are not really cool. They’d be even less cool if it was Germans doing an Auschwitz theme, or Japanese doing the Rape of Peking, or Americans doing Hiroshima. Although Yobbo (ever quick off the mark when there are some besmirched colonists to defend) reminds us that “lots of people benefitted from the ‘colonial project’ … including many of those who were colonised”, I’m sure he’s also aware of the fact that those native beneficiaries of colonization were far outweighed by those who … well … died. Whatever moral spin you want to put on colonization, you can’t avoid the fact that it tended to have the effect (intended or otherwise) of exterminating populations.
I guess it’s a matter of where you place this on the continuum of tastelessness. I’d be cool enough with a bunch of (rather dark-humoured) Jews holding a crucifixion party, or with a bunch of Spanish Catholics doing the inquisition. I wouldn’t be cool with white Americans doing a KKK theme, or with white South Afrikans finding costumes for “Heroes of Apartheid”. Perhaps it’s a time thing - when there are still people alive today who suffer (in some way) from the repercussions of a certain injustice, it is wrong for others, particuarly those who have some historical association with the perpetration of that injustice, to treat it as a joke. No, I don’t think that this “colonial or native” party was celebrating colonialism, but it was saying “here’s a subject which we can now have a bit of a laugh with”. I think there are still many people in the world for whom the subject of colonialism is anything but a joke.
Enrolling
In 2002, I arrived at Monash Uni to enrol in my Arts degree. I’d set aside a whole day, based on the enrolment nightmare of Adelaide Uni in the early 1990s, where sweltering noonday queues snaked from the union building back to North Terrace and where an extra staff member was employed to lift pannikins of iced water to the cracked lips undergraduates so that only a bare minimum would collapse from dehydration on the steps of the Barr Smith Library, each clutching a smudged HECS form in triplicate and mumbling a confused recital of course names and subject codes.
I was pleasantly surprised, in 2002, to find myself on the train home from the Caulfield campus with a calico showbag over my arm and my shiny new student card nestled safely in my pocket, having completed a circuit of the enrolment centre that was barely long enough to qualify as a traipse. I was in and out in under an hour. The experience was repeated, with a few variations, when I enrolled at LaTrobe in 2003.
So today, freewheeling into Melbourne University and consulting the maps to find the Education school, I had much less of a sense of trepidation. I expected that at this campus, the jewel in the crown of Victorian higher education, the enrolment procedure would have been refined to peak efficiency. Surrounded by towering sandstone monuments to science and reason, I felt confident that these values would have been brought forcibly to bear upon the fresh-faced rabble of subjects choosing subjects. I half imagined that I might find myself moving by conveyor.
Not the case. Once again, a line of people stretching past vanishing point, paralysed by boredom and sunstroke. A whole sheaf of forms, each more impenetrable than the last. There were enough seats for a full bench of course advisers, but barely a quorum were in action. The last stage was the student card, a clumsy four-step process culminating in a scene that combined the resigned, stultifying depressiveness of an international transit lounge with the simmering desperation of a food distribution centre. Occasionally a name was called above the muted noise of the exhausted crowd. An eager punter would rush up only to find that only his signature was required - the card, laser printed and perforated, then had to be drawn back into the production line, awaiting the services of a forlorn figure huddled over what appeared to be a consumer-grade laminating machine. She would place each ragged-looking card between two layers of plastic and allow it to be drawn (with the speed of centuries) between the heated rollers. When it eventually emerged from the rear of the machine, it had to be checked for the integrity of its seals. Many had to be retried. The successful cards were then handed to a girl with a voice like a feather boa being gently laid on a satin bedspread. It was her job to unite the cards with their proper owners, and (to her credit) she did it without breaking a decibel.
Still, I eventually left, with the superior air and the extra inbox allowance of a postgraduate. And there is something about the sandstone. After all, if one is to be cloistered…
Frustration Free
This message comes to you by courtesy of Primus Telecom. Specifically, it comes through the Primus dialup account which I maintain and pay for as a backup for when my Primus ADSL is offline (which happens at least once every couple of weeks). I pay on my Primus phone bill to ring up their ADSL support service each time it happens, but usually I give up after about twenty minutes on hold, plug the phone line into my dialup modem, and pay another 15c to Primus for the privilege of dialling in to this account, the one that I only maintain because their other one is so crap.
Oh, and I think it’s great that they’re reimbursing phone calls to the tsunami-affected areas during the first week of the disaster. I’m sure it adds up to a handsome total well into four figures. What also adds up, though, is the time that every customer who rings in for support has to waste because some dope has thought it might be a good idea for Primus to showcase their compassion by subjecting every support customer to a 30-second recorded summary of Primus generosity before their call is put through. For a customer who has to listen to it for the third time in ten minutes because the electronic menu system lacks a back button, the experience is unlikely to result in a warm glow. I’m sure the people who are actually receiving a refund would be quite happy to find out when they look at their bills. Does it really need to be broadcast in such an obtrusive way? Is this an example of that conspicuous compassion we keep hearing about?
It’s Time to Go …
Germaine Greer is going on Celebrity Big Brother, and lays her cards on the table:
“It’s going to be embarrassing if I get drunk or if I get off with anyone. I won’t tolerate anal intercourse.”
Just as well she cleared that up. Let’s face it, Big Brother is typically nothing but a three-month festival of rogering.
The Belief Pill
I’m an atheist, but I usually envy believers. It would be terrific to think that there was a God. I’d love to think that my life was part of some greater plan, that I was living for some divine purpose. Not least of all, I like to think that there was life after death. If there was a drug I could take which would make me believe all these things, I’d give it serious consideration. I have no particular visceral attachment to the idea of life as a fundamentally meaningless abstraction, something that happens because it happens and then ends because it ends. I believe it because it seems overwhelmingly likely, not because I like it.
I’m sure there are many believers whose faith has been of great benefit to them in dealing with the recent tragedy. If the newspapers and the blogs are to be believed, though, there are also many who have been thrown into some kind of conflict. How can a supposedly benevolent and all-powerful God allow something so terrible to happen? Theists seem to have various ways of answering that question (see Mark Bahnisch’s post on the subject, for example), and it would obviously be pointless for me to enter the discussion since I don’t believe in God, all-powerful or otherwise. It has occurred to me, though, that this might be an occasion when the believers might find something to envy about atheism.
When I read people labelling the tsunami as “evil”, I at first dismissed the idea as utterly bizarre. How can a natural occurrence have any moral property at all, let alone one as extreme as evil? The moral sphere, the continuum between right and wrong, is something that only exists in the realm of human behaviour, since only humans are capable of ethical contemplation. A tsunami can’t be evil any more than a tree or a rock can. A tsunami has no choice about how it behaves, and certainly no ability to assign moral values to a range of options. There are moral dimensions to the overall situation, but they have to do with how we prepare for it, how we respond, and what lessons we learn. They have nothing to do with the actual shifting of the actual tectonic plates or the actual propagation of the actual wave, all of which are morally neutral.
Then I realised: if you believe in an omnipotent God, then every damn thing becomes a moral issue. No matter what happens anywhere, someone (i.e. God) has weighed up the pros and cons and decided to go ahead with it. Tsunamis, plagues, epidemics, massacres, droughts, famines and termite infestations all result from conscious decisions on the part of a particular being who (we presume) is quite capable of moral reasoning. So when something like this happens, a believer is faced with a double whammy. Not only is there the reality of the disaster and the suffering of the victims, there is also this need to ask why. The event itself cannot be written off as a random occurrence, so it has to fit into some kind of moral code.
One way around this is outlined by a commenter Link on Mark’s post:
Suffering is relative. Planet earth is a volatile, dangerous place for all life. As a believer in an omnipotent God … [I think] we are far too concerned with the point of death and far too little concerned about what happens after that.
In other words (if I understand him), yes this seems terrible and inexplicable to us here on Earth based on our own limited experiences, but let’s not forget that we’re part of a bigger scheme that we can’t possibly hope to understand, and that when you put these deaths into the context of divine will and everlasting life, things might not look so bad after all. If we assess God’s actions as evil, we’re doing so on the basis of Earthly naivety – God, being omnipotent and omniscient, is taking into account a whole raft of considerations that we have no way of incorporating into our judgment, so let’s just take it on faith that he’s doing a good job.
Obviously, I disagree with that, but I can see that if I took the belief pill then it might make sense. The question is this: where does that leave human moral reasoning? Is it foolish for us to think that our own ethical reflection is worthwhile? If true, divine morals can justify something as palpably horrible as the deliberate drowning of hundreds of thousands of people beneath a wall of water, something that would be morally repugnant according to our own primitive estimates, then maybe we should stop kidding ourselves that we can discern right from wrong. Better, surely, to leave those things in the hands of God, who will presumably intervene where necessary to make sure that things work out for the best. Why not rape and murder and pillage to our hearts’ content, because for all we know it might be right in the same way that the tsunami was right?
The argument can be taken even further. If our moral codes are really so wholly inadequate, and God’s so perfect, then we should surely discard all of our humanly constructs and rely instead on divine wisdom as revealed (the argument goes) in the scriptures. If we see a directive laid down in a sacred text, we should never presume to question it – after all, who are we to discern whether the instruction is moral? Regardless of how despicable the act might seem, we should perform it based on our faith in God who, unlike us, knows enough to know why a tsunami is right. No “evil” should be unimaginable provided that we find divine justification for it. The same cosmically enlightened system of reasoning that makes it okay to slaughter hundreds of thousands in a tsunami might well (for all we know) provide perfect justification for the occasional act of faith-based violence, even terrorism.
It seems to me that a truly benevolent God would do one of two things. Either He would make his moral scheme comprehensible to us (through a detailed explanation or through very explicit and unambiguous instructions) or He would provide conditions in which our own moral reasoning could be employed to guide us. Since (despite the protestations of those, like the jihadis, who fail to acknowledge the ambiguities) he hasn’t done the former, then (if there is a God) he must have done the latter. Surely God would not have provided us with a system of guidance (our respective moral compasses which, although they’re not perfectly calibrated, seem to point in remarkably similar directions much of the time) unless there was a reason for it? If human moral agency was really so pointless, He at least would have provided us with a viable alternative. But how can those human ethics mean anything if they are contained within a larger divine moral sphere in which mass slaughter is justifiable? What’s the use of a moral capacity if it’s stunted and crippled? Did God intend to maintain two incompatible moral systems in parallel, one for Him and one for us, such that the conflict only becomes apparent when He decides deliberately to inflict suffering upon us?
If I had taken the belief pill, I think times like this would have me reaching for a larger dose.
Apologies
In the days immediately following the Asian tsunamis, this website experienced its highest traffic ever. It was a shock, considering that the blog had been in hibernation for months with only background noise registering on the site stats. Initially, I assumed that the extra hits resulted from a cursory link over at Tim Blair’s, but the referrer logs told a different story.
Just about all those extra hits came from people Googling up information about the tsunami. Not surprising, perhaps - we’re living through a defining period of history, and it’s natural (and positive) that people are curious about it and that they might inundate the web with queries. It might not even be that surprising that my website was fairly high in the Google searches (in the first 20 or 30 matches), considering that I was fairly quick off the mark in writing on the subject and might have made it onto the index a couple of Googlebot crawls ahead of many others who may have been too busy digesting Christmas dinner to fire up the blogging software.
There’s something else, though, and it gave me a strong pang of sadness when I realised. I have this site configured to display the titles of the three most recent blog entries in the title bar, separated by ellipses. The entry immediately preceding my first tsunami post was one where I briefly emerged from blog hiatus in order to publicise a gig I was doing. It was headed “Still Alive”. So the title bar at that point would have read “Tsunami … Still Alive … Schools & Trades”. Google, of course, displays the title of the page in its index. So searchers were presented with the impression that I was writing as a survivor of the tsunami. How sad to think that at least some of those extra hits were the result of worried relatives hoping to click through and find that their loved ones were “Still Alive”. If anyone is still reading this hoping for good news, I can only apologise for being a dead end.