County cricket's substitutes system badly in need of simplifying - Chris Waters
THERE have been so many substitutes in the early weeks of the County Championship season that clubs have almost needed fourth officials to supervise them all.
By my calculations, there have been 12 in the 22 fixtures played to date, nine for injury, two for illness and one for concussion.
Yorkshire have had three in their two games alone - Will Luxton replacing Jonny Bairstow after the wicketkeeper suffered a fractured right thumb against Glamorgan in Cardiff, then Logan van Beek and Ben Cliff coming in for Jhye Richardson and Jack White after the pace bowlers went down with food poisoning during the game against Hampshire at Headingley.
Although they would not be the first to experience tummy trouble after sampling the Headingley cuisine (joke), there have been more comings and goings so far than in a knocking shop, bringing county cricket’s own house into ill-repute.
For more than 150 years, first-class cricket in England existed without the need for such rotation of resources.
If WG Grace got his beard stuck in a letter box and was unable to take to the field that day, he simply waited for the fire brigade to arrive while Gloucestershire or England continued without him.
If Brian Close missed the first session of a Championship game because he was too busy studying the form in the Racing Post, completely forgetting that he needed to be somewhere, Fred Trueman would put down his pipe and go out to toss up instead, before proceeding to bowl like the wind while advising new arrivals to “leave the gate open, sunshine, tha won’t be stopping.”
Simples. No dramas. No big deal.
Life, in general, was much simpler back then.
If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it in other words but, as if cricket was not already sufficiently complicated, along came the new rule for this season which allows players to be replaced mid-game for injury, illness or “significant life events” - their Xbox has broken, for example, or the missus has mislaid the remote control.
Although fine in principle in the case of childbirth, serious family illness, and so on, in practice it has led to a predictable kerfuffle, with more replacements than you could shake a copy of the Racing Post at.
These replacements must also be “like-for-like” (very difficult, when you stop to think about it) and require the acquiescence of various people from match referees and chief executives to chief medical officers.
Anyone substituted out cannot play for eight days in any form of county cricket, although they can play in The Hundred (phew, thank goodness for that…) in an effort to guard against gamesmanship.
However, it does nothing of the sort really, for what is to stop clubs milking the system based on their own fixture list and, indeed, in the final round of the season especially, when presumably it would be open-house for substitutes when no such “they can’t play for eight days” rule matters.
With Yorkshire not having had a match last week by quirk of their own fixture list, it means that Richardson and White are free to play in their next game, against Sussex at Headingley starting on Friday, whereas otherwise they would not be allowed to do so, a clear glitch in the process, even if both were genuinely ill.
The trial itself follows ones in Australia, South Africa and India and comes at the behest of the International Cricket Council (ICC), which is exploring the use of substitutes in Test cricket.
It is, in this view, an unnecessary innovation.
Granted, there will always be the odd time when a side is reduced to ten or even nine men and the spectacle suffers as a result, but injuries and illness are part and parcel as much as they were in WG’s day.
If cricket is so keen to micromanage every potential variable, then why does it allow for a coin toss?
Why can some counties field England players in certain matches and others not? The list of potential imbalances is clear, which is why county cricket nowadays is a lottery.
If substitutes must be used, then why not just simplify things completely and remove all potential for gamesmanship/controversy.
Why not just say that every county can use one, two or three substitutes in any game for whatever reason as they see fit - to cover for illness, injury, exceptional circumstances, or just because they believe that they misjudged the pitch at the toss and feel that they would benefit from a second spinner after all.
Use them tactically, in other words, just as they do in football, and if a player goes down after a side has already used its full quota, tough. However, you will notice that that just leaves the situation back where it started before the rule came in.
Ideally, then, bin the experiment - just as they binned the Kookaburra ball trial.
Or, if we must have it, let clubs name 12, 13 or 14 players for every match and use them without restriction.
That way, at least it becomes part of the game’s strategy as opposed to allowing the strategists to game the system.