It is possible ...

[blamebrampton]

... that there is a god, and he or she really likes Alastair Cook. Being a lovely lad, Cook expressed sympathy to Beer, who had no-balled his potential first test wicket.

It's all a bit exciting today!

Comments

[glorafin.livejournal.com]

I read about that incident and it puzzled me.

I thought that no-balls were purely left to the subjective appreciation of the umpires. But the BBC report says that TV technology was used to determine if it was a no-ball or not. Are there strict rules about what makes a no-ball? The distance to the wicket or the height of the bounce for instance?

Cheers

[blamebrampton.livejournal.com]

A no-ball ruling can be given for a lot of reasons and you are quite right that some of them are subjective, but the classic, clear-cut, no-questions-asked no ball is when the bowler's foot lands past the return crease. This was the case in this incident -- Beer's front foot was just too far forward.

The rule, though allows for bowling motions that don't put the heel down, and only land on the front part of the foot, which is why the umpire called for a review, because if the photograph had shown that the back of Beer's foot had been in line to be landing in the right place, it would have been good, even though he did not put the heel down.(If you watch the footage, he first went to check if he could see any heel mark on the ground.)

Standing behind the bowler, it wasn't possible to judge this line, while the photograph made it clear that his foot was, sadly, too far forward.

[glorafin.livejournal.com]

Of course! The footwork! I forgot all about it... We Europeans were cruelly hit when the BBC lost the rights to the cricket matches. It's been ages since I saw a test match, and my familiarity with the rules suffers as a result. Cheers.