Cricket's new rules won't curb bad behaviour

Fiery fast bowlers letting fly at dashing or defiant batsmen is the most compelling part of Test cricket’s plot‚ the distillation of the game to its elemental duel.

Loosed from the ridiculous and unfair constraints they are forced to abide by in limited overs cricket‚ the quicks are able to unleash with disciplined abandon — and sharp words and body language — when the captain lobs them a red ball.

Fast bowlers who read are a rare breed‚ but those who do and study the regulations that will be part of their reality from Thursday might wonder whether cricket wasn’t trying to douse their fire.

The bad news is that umpires will have the authority to banish players from the field.

The good news is that‚ to earn a sending off‚ players will have to commit what constitutes a level four offence under the code of conduct.

So anything short of “threatening to assault an umpire‚ making inappropriate and deliberate physical contact with an umpire‚ physically assaulting a player or any other person and committing any other act of violence”‚ in the words of an International Cricket Council release on Tuesday‚ shouldn’t lead to an early shower.

That’s enough leeway to allow the confrontations between batsmen and bowlers to retain the spice essential to cricket’s character.

But it also means the new rules are unlikely to curb less savoury aspects of player behaviour.

Referees have been brandishing cards for decades but footballers remain comfortably the worst behaved of all sport’s men and women.

And football’s not the only game that can’t control its brats: anyone for tennis' tantrum tosser Nick Kyrgios?

The guinea pigs for cricket’s new measures‚ which will apply across all formats‚ will be South Africa and Bangladesh‚ who start their Test series in Potchefstroom on Thursday‚ and Pakistan and Sri Lanka‚ who clash in the United Arab Emirates on the same day.

Unusually for instances of regulation-tinkering‚ the bowlers have also won a concession.

“To maintain the balance between bat and ball the playing conditions now restrict the size of the edges of the bats as well as their thickness‚” the release says.

“The restriction on the length and width of bats remain unchanged but the thickness of the edges can’t be more than 40 millimetres and the overall depth can be 67 millimetres at the most.”

Umpires‚ who take the field carrying everything from notebooks to nail scissors in their pockets‚ will have an exciting bit of kit to flaunt: “Umpires will be issued with a new bat gauge‚ which they can use to check a bat’s legality.”

Sensibility has prevailed in that “… a review will now not be lost in case of a decision that remains unchanged solely as the result of an ‘umpire’s call’”.

More evidence of sound thinking is that a bat that has bounced into the air at the moment the wicket is broken — after being grounded when the wicket was intact — will no longer mean batsmen have been run out or stumped.

But a decision to permit the use of the decision review system in T20s can only rob the format of some of its trademark freneticism.

 - TimesLIVE