A mankad prevents batsmen from taking the piss

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Before the Asia Cup qualifying round, the Asian Cricket Council is said to have met with the four Associate teams and told them not to mankad. Oman’s Aamir Kaleem was having none of it. He did for Hong Kong’s Mark Chapman in precisely that manner. Oman won.

There’s now been a suggestion that teams playing in the first round of the World T20 – other than Oman – have agreed not to mankad. This way anarchy lies.

When asked about the Kaleem-Chapman incident the other day, Ireland captain Will Porterfield said: “That is not something that we will be doing.”

So there’s a clear message to opposition batsmen: Stroll down the pitch as far as you like. Do it every ball. There is nothing Ireland are going to do to stop you.

Because that’s what the mankad is. It’s maybe not a mode of dismissal to celebrate, but to condone it is to overlook its purpose. It’s one of the necessary checks and balances that keeps batsmen from taking the piss. It’s the community policing itself because even minor crimes need a deterrent.

 

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19 comments

  1. Appealing for a caught behind for an obvious brush of the thigh pad – Totally fine.
    Running out a batsman for trying to get an unfair advantage – outrageous.

    You know it makes sense. The spirit of cricket is an arse.

    1. After a lot of thought, I think the discrepancy is simply that you have to deliberately commit the mankad before you can appeal it. You don’t deliberately set out to brush the thigh, but if it just so happens to have happened, then appealing is legit.

      Not sure why this works but it seems to be the underlying “logic”.

      1. It seems reactive cheating is more acceptable than proactive cheating prevention.

      2. What should we do about commenters who walk down the comments section in the time dimension? Sneaky bastards, they post one comment every minute or so and before you know it, you have to read an entire paragraph. Totally inadmissible I tell ya!

      3. I say we Bowden them. And make them carry that BADGE OF SHAME. Imagine the pub conversations! “Why the long face?” “Ah, got Bowdened today – this is going to take some strong stuff to drown out”.

      4. How are you pronouncing that?

        Just want to know whether that’s us or the crooked-fingered umpire.

  2. A point of view: There’s already a mechanism whereby everyone taking part in competitive cricket agrees not to do certain things – I believe the correct term is “the laws of cricket”.

    When everyone moaned about back-passing during the 1990 (football) World Cup, the Back-Pass rule was introduced. Teams don’t pass it back to the keeper to boot the ball down the pitch anymore.

  3. I think the rules should be changed to allow back-foot noball only if bat is grounded behind the foot (can be checked using Hawk-Eye) this way we can do away with both Mankad & the warnings before executing it

  4. You’re sailing dangerously close to expressing an opinion on something here.

    Whatever happened to good old-fashioned ambivalence?

    1. We’re still in contact with the fence. We’re not in ‘mankads are amazing’ territory here, which seems an increasingly common mark-yourself-out-as-being-hard-nosed stance.

    1. “Dew was a factor but we’ve got no excuses” – William Porterfield directly contradicting himself in the one sentence.

      1. Pretty standard practice these days to say something like: “We can’t use injuries as an excuse,” or, “of course the toss was important, but we don’t want to make excuses.”

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