Scoring

This is another one of those jobs that seems to lack takers in our club. I've never been able to do it because I've never been taught as such. I've watched people do it and have a vague idea, but it's confusing because different people do it in different ways. In the past I've down loaded instructions off the internet and there's one website in New Zealand that seems to have a pretty comprehensive series of instructions that looks like the way that my club captain of the past year does it, so that's the one I've used to try and learn.

http://www.aucc.co.nz/Cricket%20scoring%20-%20getting%20started.pdf

But tonight I had an idea after watching the test match last night in the West Indies. At one point the camera panned around the crowd in between overs and zoomed in on a bloke who had what looked like a scorebook on his lap and I thought there's one of those autistic types - that has to make lists and it looks like his thing is cricket scores. But the camera zoomed in and he was doing a crossword, but my initial conclusion which I'd jumped to gave me an idea. Instead of just sitting here watching the cricket on the computer, use it as an opportunity to learn how to score? So tonight armed with my Bourne's Empire cricket scoring book I had a go and it looks like it might work. One of the scores that came up was a 5 that came off a leg-bye. So I've now got to look into that rule/law and see where the single came from. I understand that the 4 came from the fact that it crossed the boundary, but did the single come by virtue of the batsmen running? Once I've figured that out and looked at the law I can then have another go at scoring during the next match and put the learning into practice, I have to do it in order to learn it as I'm a Kinesthetic learner http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinesthetic_learning

There's also potential for my boys to do the same and learn using the same system, I'm not entirely convinced that they'll take the bait, but I might run it by them and see if they do?

So using Wikipedia again I came up with this - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leg_bye

Leg bye
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In the sport of cricket, a leg bye is a run scored by the batting team when the batsman has not hit the ball with his bat, but the ball has hit the batsman's body or protective gear.
If the ball deflects off the batsman's body and needs to be gathered by a fielder, the batsmen may have the opportunity to score runs safely, and may choose to do so. The number of runs scored are scored as leg byes - they are added to the team's total, but not to the number of runs scored by either batsman, nor to the number of runs conceded by the bowler.
If the ball deflects off the batsman's body and travels all the way to the boundary, the batting team immediately scores four leg byes, similar to if the ball had been hit to the boundary for a four.
Leg byes may only be scored if the ball hit the batsman while the batsman was in the process of either:
attempting to hit the ball with his bat, or
attempting to evade being hit by the ball.
If the batsman was attempting neither of these, and the ball hits his body, it is a dead ball and runs may not be scored. The batsmen may, however, attempt to score runs and may be run out. If they complete such a "run" when the ball is dead, the umpire will signal dead ball, the run is not scored, and the batsmen must return to their wickets as before the run attempt.


I've now had a look at the law and how to fill in the scoring book and it's one of the those situations where it looks as though it's not going to happen that much in a match and it'll take me a while to remember the sequence as it's entered into the score book, but it looks like this is the order in the scoring of the 5 I've just seen.

1. An upside down triangle is entered into the batsmans line.
2. Four runs are added to the running total on the RH side of the score book.
3. One point is added to the Leg Byes extra row
4. An upside down triangle is entered in the bowlers analysis

I'm tempted to look at other incidence, but I'll leave them until I come across them as I've just noticed a load of contradictory information about how to record byes!

Other News

As we're on holiday (Half term) at the minute I decided that we'd go and hire a badminton bay at the leisure centre and have some indoor practice (Ben, Joe and me). We all had a bit of a bowl and a bat and both of them bowled and batted better than me! We also did some fielding exercises - they especially liked the 2 fielders chasing down the ball where the lead fielder scoops up the ball for the follow up fielder to then turn and throw the ball back in. We did some catching practice which they're getting much better at and seem to enjoy, but God knows what they're going to be like with real balls, as every time I suggest doing some easy work with real balls they're not up for it at all! Ben was rubbish at using the long barrier technique, so that's something he'll have to work on. I also set up some stumps and got them trying to throw the ball at the stumps over a fair distance - 30-35 yards. The thing with that was that Ben wasn't interested in taking any notice of my advice. I was trying to teach him the Paul Collingwood technique as they do at his club, but it was as though because I was telling him I was talking nonesense. Ah well - can't get too hung up on it. http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/cricket/skills/7399136.stm

Other than that I went across to our field and checked out how it was fairing after all the recent harsh weather. It's not too bad. The wicket markers are all still in place. The grass shows no signs of growing yet and looks fairly sparse across the whole field. The earth is really moist no doubt in part due to the fact that the grass isn't growing and therefore not drawing up the water. Being so soft it looks like the ideal time to roll it, but I noticed that football field had just recently been white-lined so there's obviously football intended this coming weekend. I'll just have to see how it pans out and leave it for at least another 2 weeks and see what happens.

We also went over to another field where we practice Five Tree Field and had a look at that as that's normally a very flat surface. That too was also very wet, but looked a lot lumpier than I expected it to be. While we were over there I noticed one of the ground staff and asked about the footballers erecting ther own goal posts and nets as they do and whether this was allowed and the this particular bloke said no. He went on to explain that the issue was that after a weekend of damage from the official football teams the ground staff hope that the field then has a good five days in which to recover, so if during the week groups of blokes come along and start playing 7 aside games on the same fields as they do further damage is done to the fields. I didn't go on to ask the question so would it be okay then if we were to erect cricket nets on a non-football field. Instead what I'll do is email the main man himself and see what he says about the prospect of us putting up nets for a couple of hours every fortnight?