Using over-rate fines for important research

Kane Williamson will soon be seen starring in the remake of I Am Number Four
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Yesterday, Graeme Smith wondered on Twitter ‒ that miracle of 21st-century communication that has enabled all people to communicate with their followers without having to go through the cumbersome logistical rigmarole of recruiting, training and editing a team of crack gospel writers ‒ what the ICC would do with the 100% dawdling tax levied on him and his team-mates match-fees for their funereal over-rate in the Paarl ODI.

“I hope it goes to a good charity,” Smith tweeted. The Confectionery Stall hopes so too. Perhaps a care home for all the retired England captains that Smith has ushered into the cricketing sunset. I fear, however, that the money will instead be ploughed into a feasibility study into whether it would be possible for Azhar Mahmood to represent 365 different Twenty20 franchises in a calendar year.

The Proteas took three hours 56 minutes to send down 45.4 overs as New Zealand snatched a stunning one-wicket victory. The over-rate that cost them all their wages for the day, plus the services of their captain, AB de Villiers, during a two-game suspension: 11 overs and four balls per hour.

Old-timers will no doubt shake their heads in disgust and reminisce on how they once saw Harold Larwood bowl an over in 34 seconds off his full run-up whilst quaffing a pint of restorative ale with one arm and mining some coal with the other, and how back in their day, three hours 56 minutes was time enough to play a full first-class match, run for parliament, and write a hit musical about the benefits of uncovered pitches.

Perhaps these fictitious people exaggerate. But if so, it is not by much. This scorecard suggests that when Australia’s Warren Bardsley carried his bat at Lord’s in 1926, against an attack containing three seamers – including Larwood – and one spinner, England bowled 154.5 overs in six hours 38 minutes. This equates to 23 overs and two balls per hour – precisely twice as many overs per hour as South Africa squeezed out in Paarl.

Perhaps a good charity could be set up to examine why cricket came to be played half as quickly as it was in the past. Looking at archive footage on historical documentaries about the 1920s, people did seem to scuttle around rather quickly. I had always assumed that was to do with the nature of the film and filming equipment at the time, but, if England could bowl 23 overs per hour, perhaps the aggressive waddle was simply the default method of movement in those days when the motor car was still a novelty. Perhaps, as Lance Armstrong used to claim was the secret of his astonishing cycling speed, 1920s bowlers used to listen to the Benny Hill theme music on headphones to make them move significantly faster than non-Benny-Hill-music-listening people are able to move.

Admittedly, there are more pressing charitable concerns that the Earth as a planet, the human race as a species, and the ICC as a sporting organisation and beacon of justice might think worthy of addressing first. But once those issues have been adequately funded and solved, whatever money is left from the South Africans’ match fees could be productively spent analysing how and why cricket allowed itself to be decelerated so markedly through the 1970s and beyond. If cricket loses another 11 overs and four balls per hour in the next 87 years, as it did between Lord’s 1926 and Paarl 2013, it will struggle for a TV audience in the increasingly competitive global marketplace of the year 2100.