Faux objectivity: The murky business of light meters

On November 21, as Australia and South Africa moved ever closer to the thrilling finale of the second Test of their two-Test series, considerable discussion centered on whether the umpires in charge of the game would provide the ultimate buzz-kill for all concerned by consulting those dreaded killjoys, the light meters, and march off the ground with say, two runs to score or one wicket to get.

That possibility was not raised frivolously: batsmen and fielders cannot appeal any more to umpires for relief; the objective light meter dispenses with the problematic, time-wasting subjectivity of the human cricketers and places decision-making squarely in the hands of the umpire. Too bad if this gain in technocratic efficiency results in the loss of cricketing action.

But what precisely are the light meters protecting the cricketers (and us) from? From conditions where the light is either "too poor to play" or is "dangerous"? There are problems with both answers. Light meters do not have a mark that says "At this reading, it is too dangerous to play cricket because batsmen will not connect with the ball or fielders will not be able to visually sight the ball for collection". Rather, they tell us whether light has improved or worsened; the umpire is still in the business of making a judgment on whether the light is good enough to play in or if it's too dangerous.

Apparently, all that has changed is that the umpire can back up his subjective assessment by pointing to the display of the light meter as his justification.

But the problem with the light meter is even more fundamental: do we have any objective data on how batsman or fielder performance degrades in particular light conditions, and whether that degradation is such that it renders players activities pointless and meaningless? Football is played in pelting rain and mud; such conditions do a great deal to ensure that fleet-footed midfielders find their skills drastically reduced and goalkeepers can be reduced to tears. But the game goes on and is recognizable as football.

Do cricket players depend on a specific set of lighting conditions such that the failure to obtain those renders them unable to play cricket? We watch cricket of varying quality and standards all the time; why not let spectators continue to watch a game of cricket that is recognizable as such, and whose players are being forced to struggle with adverse conditions? We might not get the most beautiful game, but we will still get a contest and will not be reduced to playing trivia games on the giant television screens.

The problem, then, must be that poor light makes the game so dangerous that it simply cannot be continued. But who is in danger? Batsmen, presumably, to a far greater extent than fielders, whose placing with respects to the batsman can often protect them from injury (even if not fielding incompetence).

But again, batsmen are always in danger when facing fast bowling, and the rise in the risk they incur as light worsens has never been quantified accurately enough to justify reliance on an instrument whose only output is, as noted before, an indicator of luminosity. Does a reading of X correspond to a percentage increase of Y in danger for the batsman? We don't know.

But that does not stop cricket administrators from pretending that the light meter can be relied upon to provide objective assessment of the "dangerousness" of cricketing conditions.(Incidentally, what about the increase in danger to a batsman caused by a change in atmospheric conditions that make the ball swing alarmingly or move through the air quicker? How about a meter for that?)

The critical issue here is that in cricket, we have ample evidence of that most irritating of modern afflictions: the pretense that the deployment of technology in a sphere of human activity has suddenly introduced coherence and rectitude in a formerly muddled state of affairs. This reliance on the faux accuracy, reliability and objectivity of the technological device covers up what is actually the case: matters remain as dimly understood as before, common sense is kept at bay and the technology, the supposed saviour of us all, remains blind without adequate and appropriate calibration and adjustment to the human activity it is supposed to be regulating.