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Business News/ News / Business Of Life/  Don’t ban the bouncer, face down your fears
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Don’t ban the bouncer, face down your fears

For all the 'genteel' attributes attached to it, cricket is a hard game played with a hard ball which can hurt badly

Australia batsman David Warner ducks to avoid a bouncer from Varun Aaron during the first Test at Adelaide. PhotoL Saeed Khan/AFPPremium
Australia batsman David Warner ducks to avoid a bouncer from Varun Aaron during the first Test at Adelaide. PhotoL Saeed Khan/AFP

OTHERS :

Everybody watching the ongoing first Test match between India and Australia—at the Adelaide cricket ground and on their television sets—was waiting expectantly to see when it would come. Many believed that it would take a fair while; some experts had argued that it should come in the first over itself.

Finally it happens. The 19th ball of the game delivered by young Varun Aaron is dug in short. David Warner’s feet move with aggressive intent. At the last moment, Australia’s swashbuckling opener decides against a stroke and lets the ball sail over his head into the wicketkeeper’s gloves.

The spell that had stilled and stupefied cricket, as it were, is broken. One can detect a kind of release of tension among the players on the ground. The body language seems to become a little more relaxed. Warner, among Phillip Hughes’ closest friends, seems to heave a sigh of relief and even manages a wan smile. The crowd breaks into applause.

Maybe this is all fertile imagination. But for cricket, it was undeniably a cathartic moment; perhaps the most significant in its history. A bouncer had killed Hughes barely a fortnight earlier; only a bouncer could provide the “cure" to get over the psychological hump.

After the fatal blow to Hughes’ head in a Sheffield Shield match in Australia, some had argued that the bouncer should be banned. This is understandable. It seems cruel that a promising life was snuffed out at 25. Could it not have been prevented?

Hughes’ death obviously invited harsh scrutiny of the helmet, and even more so of the short ball. The bouncer acquired a “villainous" profile. In my opinion, banning the bouncer is not a solution; this would be a surrender to fear.

People have died in car and aeroplane accidents, while skiing, swimming, running, to name just a few of the activities that we haven’t given up. Safety standards are studied and sought to be improved for life to resume.

This might seem like a heartless diagnosis considering that the world is still grieving over Hughes’ death. But when you take a 360-degree view of the event, you realize that there can be no recourse other than a stoic philosophical disposition—aided with some hard-boiled statistics—to overcome it.

The statistical aspect is crucial in understanding this extraordinary event. It helps provide a perspective on why the bouncer is not the malady that its opponents have pronounced it to be.

Newspaper reports have suggested that a hundred people have died from the kind of blow that killed Hughes—but his is the only case in first-class cricket. These facts suggest that not only was Hughes’ death an unfortunate accident, but that it was among the rarest of rare cases.

The bouncer has been an integral part of cricket since the sport came into existence. For all the “genteel" attributes attached to it, cricket is a hard game played with a hard ball which can hurt badly, as anybody who has played it at any level will testify.

The risk of injury is inescapable, for the use of the bouncer as a weapon of intimidation has inbuilt legitimacy in the laws of the game. Obviously, this intimidation can’t be misused to the extent that it is aimed to maim or kill.

Over a process of evolution, laws have been amended or equipment has been added to ensure that things don’t get out of hand. But scores of batsmen at every level of the game have been hit.

The Bodyline series of 1932-33, when England captain Douglas Jardine aimed to stop Don Bradman’s phenomenal run-getting and win the Ashes by hitting batsmen rather than getting them out, forced a relook at the ethos of cricket. In that series, England’s opening bowler Harold Larwood hit Australian captain Bill Woodfull over the heart and fractured wicketkeeper Bert Oldfield’s skull.

That did not stop bouncers though. In the 1970s, helmets came into play as the batsmen came under greater fire from fast bowlers. I believe Nari Contractor being felled by a Charlie Griffith bouncer in 1962 provided the trigger for equipment manufacturers to introduce safety guards.

Now, the helmet should and must be improved. More research and development is necessary to minimize the threat of death. But that can only be a constant endeavour, not a guarantee.

Human beings, all told, are a fragile species. The threat of death is omnipresent in life itself. This gets enhanced in sport, and is not necessarily restricted only to those that look seemingly violent or risky. Boxing and motor-racing have usually been considered lethal, but people have died while running too, especially over long distances.

There is not a little irony that a 29-year-old cricketer died playing club cricket in Mumbai on Tuesday. He was not hit on the head, but collapsed while fielding and succumbed to a heart attack. The news did not make front-page headlines like Hughes’ death, but it was no less tragic.

To end with some homespun philosophy, what could be more debilitating than the fear of mortality? In many ways, competitive sport instils the courage—physical and mental (without lapsing into foolhardiness, of course)—to conquer such negative sentiment. In this context, the bouncer is important not just for cricket but, at a metaphysical level, as a panacea against the fear of living.

Ayaz Memon is a senior columnist who writes on sports and other matters.

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Published: 10 Dec 2014, 09:13 PM IST
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