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IPL 2020: The case of the corrupted cricket catch
I say that I would rather defend it seeing as how that little hop, skip and jump or what I refer to as the cricket ballet on the boundary line is visually very attractive and adds to the fun.
- PUBLISHED: Tue 20 Oct 2020, 6:42 PM
As any lawyer will tell you every person has the right to legal representation. I am not a lawyer but journalists come close enough to making arguments and so a friend of mind has asked me to prosecute the corrupted catch and can I make a case against it.
I say that I would rather defend it seeing as how that little hop, skip and jump or what I refer to as the cricket ballet on the boundary line is visually very attractive and adds to the fun. This is especially so when it goes back to the reruns and replays and frame by frame investigation. But let's see if we can find fault with it. Frankly, the evidence that it is not a true catch is ample. It is a shared catch at best. In passing it deliberately to a team member one changes its natural trajectory and thus, reworks the dynamics of a completed catch.
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This is different from the ball glancing on the fingertips and hitting the stumps thereby winning a run out or moving from a grasp to a second player's hands because the ball is on its original flow.
The hampering is incidental. When the ball is held, then passed on to another or sent up by the player till he regains his legal composure it then means the ball has no longer any relationship with its original momentum.
It is now being dispatched in an arc created not by the batsman but by the fielder. In physics it has for a nano second stopped and started on a new trek. This so totally negates the fidelity of the catch.
Even in cases like that of Jonathan Trott, captain of Middlesex who was out in 2009 when the ball was hit by him squarely and lodged in the fielder's trouser pocket. Out. But the ball was honest to itself and did not touch the ground. In the case of the two step dance it is a manipulated final movement that does not involve the batsman. How is that fair?
