Right, because people behind the bowlers arm in the stadium and stands have to be doing massive star jumps and wearing bright colors for it to be distracting and off putting to the batsman right?
Disagree, there is an absolute point, as much point as there is on "I want to make the batsman play squarer" (i.e no point at all) - like I said above, the follow up to the short ball is generally what? Another short ball? This isn't Craig McMillan we're talking about.
Way to posture and postulate.
He had short mid-offs and mid-ons (including the covers and midwickets, he had about five of them). Yet Azhar was playing so straight that they weren't doing the job. The fielder was literally placed where he was hitting the ball with regularity. It's clearly not a conventional idea and it quite clearly didn't work, but this stuff about it being "deliberately distracting the batsman" is just silly. It is actually the result of the most simple pieces of cricketing logic imaginable - ball goes through gap, plug gap.
Sure, but there's a difference between "I don't know if this really works" and "spirit of cricket!!1!1"
Yes, he had short mid-ons and mid-offs, notice I said conventional mid-ons and mid-offs.. If he's that concerned about Siddle being pumped straight back past him, he should tell him to adjust his length so he's not so easy to drive. The batsman stated that it was distracting. If you've batted with sight screens before in cricket you get entirely sensitive to anything other than a big white background in your eyeline. Having a cricketer moving around at all would have caught the eye and made it harder to see the ball - that's fact.
Well I haven't said anything about the spirit of cricket, I just think the laws need an update. There's a sight screen for a reason.
It's not Clarke's or any other fielding captain's job to deal with the potential distraction. It's the umpire's, and Nigel Llong quite clearly said that the fielder was fine so long as he didn't move as the bowler ran in - which he didn't. Whether the mere presence of the fielder is a distraction or not is, frankly, none of Clarke's business.
Oh yeah, I was more responding to the general topic rather than you specifically. I just think that this sort of thing is the umpire's job, and that people are actually spending more than five seconds complaining about it is just bewildering to me.
I'm basically arguing a mixture of:
Point taken, I should stick to my own edict of not making comment on something you're not completely across.
Well obviously you can because we did
Perhaps so, but two steps either way is such a small margin that it starts to run into the question of "well, where do you draw the line, where is this invisible box that you decree 'distracting' and everything outside is 'not distracting'" and under the principle of precise arbitrariness often leading into hilarious self-contradictions, IMO the fielding captain should just best leave it to the common sense solution of letting the bloke in the white hat work it all out and just concentrating on how to get the ****er out.
It would be pretty easy to set the width of the pitch as that invisible box.
The problem isn't in the setting, it's in the weird contradictions that result. It's a little like umpire's call for UDRS, when you get a ball which is smashing leg stump out of the ground but because it's 1mm to the legside of the middle of leg stump, it doesn't get overturned. When you try to impose strict but arbitrarily set bounds where previously no such thing applied, you often run into odd situations like that. You might, for example, get a situation where a batsman legitimately feels distracted by a fielding position but because the fielder is just outside the width of the pitch it's decreed OK (or vice versa). The umpire can then intervene, of course, but then you have to ask why the hell you bothered with the pitch width rule in the first place.
