Not cricket? Law, convention, ethics, and that run-out

Sporting contests are philosophically interesting, as well as enjoyable, because sports and games are full of rules and conventions, which inevitably raise issues of interpretation and give rise to passion about ethics and the spirit of the game. The recent run-out of English batsman, Jos Buttler by the Sri Lankan bowler, Sachithra Senanayake in the deciding one-day international match is a case in point. Buttler was run out at the non-striker’s end by the bowler almost in his delivery stride after Buttler had backed up too far The anger, complaint and tutt-tutting in the English media, amounted to a sort of slightly stifled outrage (if that is a possible condition). But there is general agreement that Senanayake did nothing against the laws (rules) of the game, so for those shocked by the run out, there is recourse to such things as violating the spirit of cricket, ungentlemanly behaviour, and the ethics of the matter. (For an interesting discussion of this and other examples of legal but improper behaviour in cricket, such as not “walking” when you know you are “out”, see Samir Chopra and David Coady, “Not Cricket” in Sport in Society: Culture, Commerce, Media, Politics, 2007.)

To be clear on the law, Law 42.11 from the International Cricket Council’s playing regulations for international cricket states that “the bowler is permitted, before releasing the ball and provided he has not completed his usual delivery swing, to attempt to run out the non-striker”.

This could hardly be clearer, so the current debate implicitly or explicitly acknowledges that there is a difference between law and morality, or, less grandly perhaps, the rules and the ethos of an activity. So, it is worth looking more closely at what happened. According to newspaper reports, Buttler had already twice been warned by the bowler when out of his crease as the bowler was about to enter his delivery stride. In spite of this he was well down the pitch when Senanayake broke the bails and appealed. The umpire asked the Sri Lankan captain, Angelo Matthews whether he wanted to withdraw the appeal and he declined to do so. The batsman trudged unhappily from the field, and after the match Alastair Cook, the England captain, when shaking hands with the victorious captain, apparently delivered angry words about the incident.

The first thing to say is that the run out testifies either to the batsman’s stupidity or his contempt for the bowler’s manifest intentions. Neither of these are admirable characteristics, and hardly put Buttler or the English team in a strong position to vent indignation at their opponents. That they did so is explained by the belief that, though within the law, the dismissal violated either a convention, an ethical norm, or the spirit of the game.

If there is a firm ethical constraint, it most plausibly would turn on whether there is a convention in place to rule out such behaviour, since the existence of a convention relies upon well-grounded mutual expectations that if one party conforms so will others. As the philosopher David Lewis argued in his book Convention, such agreement can be created without explicit declaration of rules and can be a significant part of normative control in social settings. Violation of such well-grounded convention could amount to unethical behaviour. But is there such a convention against the run out in question? And, if so, is it well-grounded?

It is debatable whether there is such a convention, but it is even more doubtful whether it is well-grounded. For the sake of argument, let us suppose that the convention exists requiring an explicit rule or law to be ignored. There certainly are conventions that dictate that a rule or law should not apply in certain circumstances. Some laws remain on the statute book long after they have ceased to make sense and people (including police and lawyers) wisely agree to ignore them. An example would be bathing regulations about the sort of clothing appropriate for swimming on public beaches which still required neck to knee (or ankle) covering long after standards of modesty and decorum had changed. But is Law 42.11 such a law?

The answer to this is, I think, palpably no. The law exists to deter and penalise non-facing batsmen who cheat by getting themselves into a position to run less than the required distance to the other end when they are in a position to see that the facing batsman has struck the ball in such a way that a quick single is possible or to respond to a call to do so. As no less an authority than Don Bradman put it:

Some cricket commentators remarked that such flouting of the law (or resort to the convention) is now so common that allowing bowlers to run out the non-striker a la Senanayake would cause chaos. This seems unlikely, but temporary disruption is a small price to pay for stopping such widespread disregard of a reasonable law. No less an authority than Sir Donald Bradman in his autobiography Farewell to Cricket in commenting on the controversy around Indian bowler Vinoo Mankad’s similar run-out of the Australian opening batsman Bill Brown in a 1947 Test match said:

“By backing up too far or too early the non-striker is very obviously gaining an unfair advantage. On numerous occasions he may avoid being run out at the opposite end by gaining this false start……he (Mankad) was scrupulously fair that he first of all warned Brown before taking any action. There was absolutely no feeling in the matter as far as we were concerned, for we considered it quite a legitimate part of the game.”

Defenders of the widespread flouting of this explicit law can argue that sometimes a non-striking batsman can unintentionally move slightly beyond his crease thinking that the bowler has just delivered the ball when he hasn’t quite. I don’t know how serious this claim is; after all, Bradman also pointedly remarked: ”I always make it a practice when occupying the position of a non-striker to keep my bat behind the crease until I see the ball in the air. In that way one cannot possibly be run out, and I commend this practice to other players.”

Nevertheless, if we want to guard against this risk then what does seem an existing convention for Mankading (as it became called after the Indian bowler made something of a habit of it) which should do the job. This is the convention of giving an offending batsman a warning the first time he strays over the crease line. Senanayake conformed to this convention, indeed rather overdid it, by warning Buttler twice for his repeated offence. As Vic Marks in The Guardian rightly remarked: “What else what he supposed to do?”

The English cricketers and their indignant supporters should just get over it.

Tony Coady is a Professorial Fellow in Philosophy at the University of Melbourne, and an Honorary Fellow of the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, University of Oxford.