Heads of Tails?

As I was away last week I asked our scorer Rob Naylor to write on my behalf. Here is his article on the toss...

Greetings from the Scorebox.

As Gloves is away this week he has asked me to step in and offer my thoughts and I suppose an introduction is needed: I’m Rob Naylor and on a Saturday I score for KICC’s 1^st XI.

The Bank Holiday weekend was a good one for the Club as three of our four teams recorded positive results on Saturday. It certainly proved a particularly fruitful one for the 1^st XI as they picked up 36pts from a possible 40; a hard fought winning draw away at Farnsfield was followed up on Monday by a fairly comfortable 109 run victory over Papplewick & Linby at home and, after a quarter of the season, we find ourselves 5^th in the NPL table.

Anyway on with my choice of subject: The Toss. Now of course winning the toss doesn’t always guarantee success and it can lead to some poor calls; just ask Nasser Hussain or Ricky Ponting about their decisions at Brisbane in 2002 or Edgbaston in 2005. Even with that in mind it has long puzzled me why such an arbitrary method - that bears no relation to a team’s ability - is used to decide who gets to bat or bowl first in a cricket match; a wrong call by the Captain and a side finds themselves put in on a damp pitch or bowling first on a flat deck that offers nothing and having to watch the opposition pile up the runs and then face scoreboard pressure when they eventually get to bat.

For instance on Saturday Sam won the toss and opted to bat first on a good track and, thanks to an excellent opening stand of 145 from Paldip Sidhu and Jon Terry (both making 75) and a blitz at the death from James Mann (43*), he was able to watch the team post an impressive 259-5 and know that the pressure would be on Farnsfield to score at a tad over five-an-over to have a chance of winning the game. Arguably there is plenty of pressure in setting a good score, but the pressure of chasing certainly took its toll on several members of the Farnsfield middle-order as they got themselves out trying to force the run-rate against the slow bowlers.

So, how could the toss become less of an arbitrary affair? Well – get rid of it! The late, great cricket writer and commentator Christopher Martin-Jenkins in his 2007 MCC Spirit of Cricket Cowdrey Lecture talked about a bidding system and this has always interested me; the idea that, for instance, upon arriving to find a damp pitch and dull overhead conditions the two captains would propose how many runs they would wish to concede in order to bowl first on such a wicket. One captain says 30, the other 35 and with the winning bid he would then have the choice of batting or bowling. Of course such ‘bidding’ would have to take place in secret, perhaps placed in sealed envelopes, and be submitted to the umpires who then reveal what each captain has bid and go from there.

Without the time or space to go into greater detail I fully accept that there are of course many pros and cons to such a system, but I think that it could be made to work and it would certainly make decision making at the start a much more thoughtful and intriguing affair with captains, coaches et al having to get a good read on the pitch and conditions. There’s no doubt that many already try to do this, but come Saturday the question of batting or bowling will still rely on choosing a head or tail.