TThe latest version of the Laws of Association Football is 26,868 words long. Despite having to deal with variations for sevens and tens, rugby union manages to deal with its rules in 22.480. Including field and equipment specifications, Hockey Sticks is 11,408 words. The latest rules of the game from the Darts Regulation Authority total just under a third of that, with heights at 4,275 words. The portion of the International Weightlifting Federation rules that actually deals with lifting weights weighs in at just 1,325 words, clean and with minimal hints of jerks. And so on down to the World Rock Paper Scissors Association, which needs just 62 words to explain the intricacies of their game, though those involved may have learned from bitter experience the potential ramifications of overuse of paper.
Every sport has its nuances, some just have more than others. Cricket, a sport where a single game can last five whole days, has a little more to offer and after last September’s update, its regulations are finally ending at 34,602 words. Add the foreword and indices, and the whole document reaches 37,827. Used wisely, these are enough words to create an entire world – CS Lewis only needed 594 more for The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. It’s almost exactly half the length of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (but 52 times longer than the conversation between Potter and Oliver Wood that sets the rules of Quidditch) and makes up 42% of The Handmaid’s Tale. Like those novels, it attempts to conjure up its own fully realized alternate reality. But unlike them, no editor stepped in when the authors’ imagination got a little out of control.
Over the years, cricketers have used their forearm bowling and aluminum racquet swingarms to pull at every stray thread dangling from their rule-weavers, forcing them to spring back into action to repair the damage. But we’re now at the point where pretty much every conceivable thing is explicitly covered. Take, for example, rule 19.5.1, subsection 4: “A skater shall be grounded beyond the boundary if any part of his body is in contact with another skater grounded beyond the boundary when the umpire believes that it intends to do so was one of the outfield players that the contact should help catch the ball.”
This is the part of the laws of cricket that deals specifically with the possibility of a fielder standing on another’s shoulders, or perhaps being thrown into the air like a gymnast from a human pyramid, while both are off the field and holding the ball collect , and carried back into the rope before returning to Earth claiming to have made a fair catch. At one point, a committee convened in one of the magnificent wood-panelled rooms in the Lord’s Pavilion to specifically discuss the possibility that a captain, who has at least 12,000 square feet of grass to defend, decides not only to place two of his fielders outside the field entirely, but also the decision to layer one over the other.
The picture that the following paragraph conjures up is even better. Here we learn that “A fielder who is not in ground contact will be treated as beyond house arrest if his/her last contact with the ground occurs prior to his/her first contact with the ball after it has been played by the bowler is was not quite within the limit”. Here, our brave team of lawmakers established whether a fielder could catch the ball inside the boundary, throw it back in the air, catch it again behind the boundary, throw it back in the air, and repeat the process as many times as they like, and the dough is still out. Which they can do very well, as long as they are in the air every time they hit the ball. As New Zealander Jimmy Neesham put it a few years ago when he became aware of this law: “So I can just endlessly jump up and down the border in place and tap the ball in the air until another fielder runs over to me , do you then tap it on him? Well, that’s stupid then.”
Michael Neser controversially fires Jordan Silk Photo: Channel Seven
These are laws that are perhaps unique to all serious sports as they are very specifically designed and worded to be as dumb as possible. And while the odds of the first being even needed seem slim, Brisbane Heat’s Michael Neser executed a cross-border double jump juggle catch in Australia’s Big Bash League last weekend to sack Jordan Silk and take the world to the absolute Remembering absurdity is Law 19.5.1 subsection five.
Two days later in the same contest, Tom Rogers was saved from being run out at the non-forward end – mankaded, if you will – because the bowler’s arm had gone past vertical before turning to knock off the stirrups (Rule 38.3.1), a nuance that the bowler himself, the Australian Adam Zampa, a 30-year-old veteran with 148 international matches, was previously unaware of. Then on Friday in Karachi, Pakistan were 15 runs from victory, a wicket from defeat and, one way or another, no more than 20 minutes from completing a convincing test against New Zealand with a result both teams had been working towards for five full days had achieved if – and despite floodlights enabling all those involved to see clearly – the umpires called it a draw because it was getting dark somewhere else (Rule 12.9.2).
If anything was more evident than the handshakes in the floodlights as the game ended unsatisfactorily, it is that the laws of cricket, long as they are, are still very much unfinished. Perhaps this committee should expedite his return to her musty, wood-panelled room in St. John’s Wood, and ideally be a little more serious this time.
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