Six things in cricket that can help change the world

The sport of cricket, and its primary host planet, Earth, have plenty of significant problems to confront, solve, ignore and/or brush under the most convenient available carpet. The world's greatest minds and most powerful people devote their time, money and genius to addressing such matters, or to distracting people from them, depending on their proclivities and priorities.

However, as the old, false saying goes: "Look after the pennies, and the pounds will take care of themselves." It is only by addressing the small, irrelevant annoyances that microscopically besmirch the game that cricket can possibly hope to find a permanent solution to its greater difficulties. And only once cricket, as humanity's greatest ever creation, has resolved its squabblings, will the rest of planet look at its example, take its inspiration, and make life utopianically perfect for all living beings, free from war, disease, dispute, poverty and over-produced music.

The Confectionery Stall fears not the sweet temptations of the trivial, however. Therefore, in an effort to set humanity on its first tentative, infant steps towards WorldPeace™, here is a list of SIX VERY MINOR IRRITATIONS IN MODERN CRICKET, the resolutions of which would surely culminate eventually in a full, eternal global nirvana.

1. Advertising on the boundary rope
The minor elements of sporting aesthetics are constantly under threat from the results-powered sledgehammer of progress. The predominance of the two-handed backhand in tennis is just one proof that utility will, understandably, conquer beauty. A cricket ball rolling into a boundary rope, then skipping into the air on contact, was the perfect culmination of the Four. Especially when it ricocheted into a naïve ball-boy's face, a lesson to us all that physics is our master.

Televised cricket cares not for such subsidiary delights. Now, the ball thuds into a padded advertisement. The triumph of bat over ball, the confirmation of a perfect cover drive, a Ranji-recalling glance, or even a spawny waft through third slip's fingertips, instantly becomes a commercial exhortation to buy some insurance for something or other, or use a global bank instead of a plastic bag under your floorboards, or make yourself smell less terrible, or drink water rather than sulphuric acid, or whatever other product or service it is thought that cricket fans might like to devote their money.

Importance: 0.14/100. We live in a branded world. This is unlikely to change much before the scheduled heat death of the universe. There are YouTube videos of balls hopping over boundary ropes. I still miss it, though.

2. The inaccurate, deceitful statement of the number of fifties scored by Test batsmen
When a batsman in a Test match reaches 50, you will be told as a matter of incontrovertible fact how many Test half-centuries he has now accumulated. "That is Big Bertie Crumphammer's 17th Test fifty," a commentator will dutifully announce, when Crumphammer reaches fifty for the 98th time in his career, his 81 dazzling centuries cast into temporary statistical oblivion for no discernible reason.

This has to stop. Did Mohammad Azharuddin, whilst scoring centuries in his first three Tests against England in 1984-85, also score his first-ever Test fifty on three separate occasions? Did the young Everton Weekes, having converted his first five 50-plus scores into centuries in a consecutive innings, run himself for 90 in Madras in January 1949 in order to get his maiden half-century under his belt, to quell the social media grumblings that he had played eight Tests without making a fifty? Imagine Narsingh Deonarine and the late George Headley batting together for West Indies in a hypothetical Test next week in which each team is allowed one player from the dead to play via a special Hawksoul Ouija machine. Both players reach fifty. Both will be credited with their "sixth" Test half-century. Are they thus peas from a statistical pod, the legendary Headley with his ten centuries in 22 Tests, whilst Deonarine has failed to trouble the honours board engravers in 18 matches? Or is Deonarine in fact a superior player because his five previous "fifties" were scored in fewer matches? Don Bradman made only 13 half-centuries in 52 Tests. Can he possibly have been all he was cracked up to be?

The world would be a better place if we were told the number of times a batsman has reached fifty, not the number of times he has reached fifty without subsequently reaching 100 (which, in isolation and without context, is a statistic of considerable irrelevance, even within the innately irrelevant field of sporting statistics). Not a better place by a discernible amount, but a better place nonetheless.

Importance: 0.13/100. The global migration crisis is probably of greater long-term significance.

3. Play ending when a wicket falls in the final over of the day
One over left on day one of a Test match. It is 278 for 3. A fast bowler roars in with a still-new cherry in his paw, and uproots at least two stumps with an unplayable devilfiend of a delivery. The crowd goes noisily berserk. And then everyone wanders off. An exciting end to the day. But how much more exciting could it have been if a new batsman has to emerge? And then, potentially, another four new batsmen after that, as the volcanic paceman ignites the history books with a sensational double-hat-trick? Admittedly, the most likely scenario is that a nightwatchman will come out, block a couple, leave a couple, and duck an ill-directed bouncer, before boring everyone senseless the following morning with an 85-ball 12, but potentially dramatic denouements are being lost.

(As a footnote, when a batsman is dismissed off the first ball of the final over of the day, please do not say that he was out "off the final ball of the day", even if it did prove to be the final ball of the day. It is like saying that Julius Caesar was assassinated on the last day of his life.)

Cricket has concocted many and varied ways of not giving the paying spectator quite what they paid for, from deducting overs from the day's allocation for the change of innings, to encouraging slow over-rates by calling stumps half an hour after the "scheduled" close of play, and jettisoning the lost overs into the nearest dustbin. Let the last over of the day play out its destiny.

Importance: 0.08/100. The regulation of the excesses and iniquities of global capitalism may be a more pressing concern for the people of Earth.

4. Close fielders putting on their leg guards under their trousers
Why does this happen? It is not as if they are trying to convince anyone they are not wearing leg guards, given that (a) fielders' leg guards are allowed, and (b) the fielders put them on in full view of umpires, opponents, TV cameras and whatever deities they hold dear.

If a fielder is to be allowed leg guards under his or her trousers, it is not such a big moral and ethical step for the laws of cricket to allow a fielder to wear leg guards on top of his or her trousers. Thus saving a minute or two of fiddling around trying to get trousers over leg guards. And enabling TV umpires to see whether the ball has ricocheted off the leg guard before being caught, which probably ought to be not out in the same way that a ball being caught off a fielder's helmet is not out.

Importance: 0.07/100. Clean water for all may be a worthier campaigning cause. That said, it might as well be fixed. Would only require a couple of emails and a press release.

5. Wicketkeepers when standing up to spinners, saying "Ooooooooh" every single ball, as if the cruel hand of fate herself has denied the bowler a certain and much-deserved wicket, even when the batsman has just played the ball safely off the middle of the bat directly into the ground with no apparent difficulty
Also shouts of "catch it" when the ball is in the air for approximately three feet on its way to a deep-set midwicket.

Importance: 0.02/100. Concerns such as this show how far the world has come since the bubonic plague wiped out one-third of the planet in the 14th century.

6. Teams wearing the same coloured clothing in limited-overs matches
Seems a bit unnecessary in this day and age.

Importance: 98.7/100. Seriously, if we cannot have clearly differentiated teams in one-day and T20 cricket, what is the point of life?