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Comment by sejje | Hacker News Reader

It's a gentleman's game. Like in golf, there are expectations of behavior.

They didn't think they needed a rule.

This was what made me certain they were wrong--the commentary of their own older brother, who's hugely respected:

> As the ball was being bowled, Ian Chappell (elder brother of Greg and Trevor, and a former Australian captain), who was commentating on the match, was heard to call out "No, Greg, no, you can't do that"[10] in an instinctive reaction to the incident, and he remained critical in a later newspaper article on the incident.[11]

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I suppose my fundamental misunderstanding is that an underarm bowl just seems like the obvious defensive move, not unsportsmanlike.

I said this in another comment and it seems relevant: "I know they're different, but in baseball the pitch is part of the game. Not being able to make good use of a pitch is a problem for the hitter, not the pitcher."

I think my baseballed mind simply cannot warp itself to your gentlemanly ways lol

Imagine the strike zone was just convention and pitchers were technically allowed to roll the ball if they were more bothered about preventing home runs than getting the opponent out. Think your baseball mind would be annoyed when someone did it, and the lawmakers would have to step in pretty quick to stop it being a regular thing...

(Think there's also a general prejudice against underarm play in professional sport as it's for kids who can't throw properly and feels like mockery. Underarm serves in tennis are frowned upon, even though an alert opponent has plenty of chance of scoring a point from them)

I don't think there's a rule against rolling the ball to a batter; it would be called a ball. It would be similar to a wild pitch or an intentional walk (when you had to actually throw the 4 balls).

I'm beginning to feel like Americans trying to understand cricket trying to understand the tactical permutations of intentional walks :D

The equivalent would be bowling a ball rather than a strike in a baseball variant where each innings ended after a fixed number of balls regardless of the number of outs (which is effectively what One Day variants of cricket are). Specifically, walking the batsman when they needed to score a home run or at least a double. I think fans would get upset!

Watch softball sometime.

I mean this does exist in baseball, kinda, but there’s incentive to not do so since it gets the opposing team closer to scoring: https://www.mlb.com/glossary/standard-stats/intentional-walk

The issue is countless teams had opportunities to do this in the past - they all knew it was an option - but they chose not to. Then suddenly one team decided “well there’s no rule…” even though it was clearly established that everyone agreed not to do it. It’s not like they discovered something new, they just broke convention with no warning at a very consequential time after many teams undoubtedly could’ve done the same to them. It’s dirty.

We all saw this on the school yard as a kid and none of us appreciated it. It’s annoying to have to enshrine literally every situation into the rules. Just play the game as intended. This is part of what has made American football become less fun to watch (besides learning about CTE’s…). Soooo many rules, constantly stopping play to assess every little mm of the play. It’s boring as hell for all involved. It’s why you often hear “just let them play!”

I actually suspect they didn’t know. When a sport is played one way for 200 years, you don’t read the rule book to check, you just copy what everyone is doing!

On the local elementary school field, sure.

At the highest levels of the sport, they know the rulebook like the back of their hand.

Have to disagree. Even in cricket, I've seen players often get stumped when a rule gets enforced and they had no idea. The 2019 CWC final had multiple such events. An overthrow that hit Ben Stokes and went to the boundary got England six runs when they'd run only two (actually, even by the rules they should've gotten only 5 runs. The umpires made a mistake there). It's something that'd have gotten Ben Stokes out had he done it "intentionally".

I disagree: players rarely know the rules in-depth. A great example is a YouTube video I watched where a Premier League and World Cup referee told the camera that most players didn’t know where they needed to be placed for kick off and that they needed to kick the ball forward. It was so bad that IFAB changed the rules to allow kick off to backpass because it was causing so much conflict at the start of football matches!

Even the commentators knew. They called it out as it happened. It was absolutely common knowledge.

Commentators typically know more than players. But in any case, the article quite literally contradicts you. The New Zealand captain believed it to be illegal and the commentator said “you can’t do that,” implying he believed it to be illegal at first.

This wasn’t only underarm, but also rolling the ball over the ground.

Imagine that, in baseball, rolling the ball over the plate were considered a strike. If so, wouldn’t pitchers go for it if, at some time, all they need to do is prevent an home run (yes, I know that doesn’t happen in baseball) and wouldn’t it, subsequently, be banned?

An under-armed ball is essentially un-hitable.

The sporting thing to do is to give the batsman a chance to score but to defeat him using skill. There is no skill in bowling and underarm ball, the batsmen is not being defeated by skill.

That said, never did I imagine that cricket would interest the HN audience.

It's not inherently unhitable. Overarm bowling is a relatively recent development in the history of the sport (rather like overarm serves in tennis). But of course, in this case, the ball was simply rolled along the ground rather than being bowled on the usual understanding of the term.

I did play some cricket as a child, and couldn't stand it... But I do remember that we started by underarm bowling. I've no idea whether this is a standard way of teaching it. I did learn overarm bowling. My one moment of joy in cricket was managing to bowl out some boy who was bullying me who was batting at the time. He kept protesting it.

I remember most of it involving standing around waiting for a solid ball to fly through the air at you.

I think it is the violation of centuries old conventions and gentlemen’s agreements that maybe should have been, in hindsight, codified, that has our attention piqued

> That said, never did I imagine that cricket would interest the HN audience.

It is of little interest to me. I live in Scotland where it is played but barely played. I have played it as a child and detested it. I also remember games on TV going on for days on end and running late so that other programmes got cancelled.

Not one of England's greater contributions to the sporting world.

It’s because overhand bowling was just the way you bowled, so nobody considered making a rule to tell you that was necessary until someone didn’t. Imagine playing football and someone picks up the ball and- oh right ;-)

This gets the history a big wrong. Overarm bowling actually had to be explicitly legalized in the mid 19th century before it became common practice: https://www.theguardian.com/observer/osm/story/0,,782938,00....

While you’re correct, it still means that everyone alive had been bowling overarm for over 100 years and I doubt most players are studying the history of their sport beyond knowing its “founding myth.”

It’s common knowledge in cricketing circles that underarm bowling is legal. The only reason not to do it is that it’s less effective (just like underarm serves in tennis).

> It's a gentleman's game.

Cricket is a game that was designed for toffs to show off their free time, to each other and the plebs (including those making the G&Ts and cucumber sandwiches for the players and spectators) who couldn't take five days out of their lives for a match.

> Like golf

That too.

There is a reason why most other sports income 60/90/ish minute matches: people closer to normal had to squeeze their sports into what little free time they actually had, usually not much more than part of Sunday afternoons or maybe a bit of time some evenings.

> there are expectations of behavior.

While social contracts can be a good thing in terms of helping varied people people get along, cricket and golf are as important in that respect as knowing which of the four forks & three spoons on the table to use next. Etiquette in those forms is just artificial rules by which you show off how "civilised" you think you are, not sportsmanship or other genuine civility.

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