Between the devil and the DRS: 250 years of the LBW Law – Almanack

The acknowledgments at the start of Postcards from the Beach, Phil Tufnell’s diary of England’s West Indian tour in 1997/98, are brief and to the point. He thanks his family, his ghostwriter, his team-mates, the England scorer Malcolm Ashton – and the Australian umpire Darrell Hair, “for giving out a left-handed batsman offering no stroke to me bowling over the wicket”. It’s hard to imagine a footballer using a diary to thank an assistant referee for an off-side decision, or a second-row forward applauding a referee’s interpretation of the scrum. But then the lbw Law has always had the capacity to make itself at home in a cricketer’s subconscious, especially one already housing a sense of injustice.

Ever since its introduction 250 years ago, lbw has been a Law of unforeseeable consequences, never mind unintended. Pick any recurring theme of cricket history – morality, prejudice, technophobia, Nasser Hussain’s predilection for comedy dismissals – and there will be an lbw story to tell. “This law,” wrote the umpire Don Oslear in The Wisden Book of Cricket Laws, “causes more doubt, disagreement, debate and discussion than the other 41 put together.” Leg before wicket was added to the Laws on Friday, February 25, 1774, at the Star & Garter on Pall Mall, where the London Cricket Club, a forerunner of MCC, regularly met to put the game to rights. Cricket lore teaches us that lbw was introduced to counter the cynical opportunism of two leading batters, “Joey” Ring and Tommy Taylor. Ring’s team-mate Billy Beldham later said he was “shabby enough to get his leg in the way and take advantage of the bowlers”. Since Ring was born in 1758, it seems likelier his tactics were one of the reasons for a revision to the Law – removing any ambiguity over the batter’s intentions – in 1788.

The Law was ultimately a consequence of the switch from curved to straight bats, which changed the natural stance of a batter. Before that, they could stand in front of the stumps and swing with impunity. Taylor reportedly averaged five across the two seasons after the revision. But, in that time, he didn’t once fall lbw. Perhaps nobody did. The first such dismissal was not officially recorded until 1795, though this is possibly because the scorers drew no distinction between lbw and bowled. Even after that, lbw was an unusual dismissal for much of the 19th century – possibly because the shame was such that batters did everything to avoid it. In the 1888 Wisden, the “well-known umpire”  Bob Thoms wrote: “This very unsightly play cannot be termed batting, ’tis simply scientific legging; and, as the popular verdict now seems dead against such play, it ought to be stopped.”

A whiff of morality and judgment has never gone away. Batters have always been more likely to be given out offering no stroke, a legacy of an era when shouldering arms was almost as vulgar as scoring on the leg side. Not that playing a shot will necessarily save you. During England’s tour of India in 1992/93, Dermot Reeve was given lbw after missing a sweep. He queried the decision, and received robust feedback. “Bad cricket,” said the umpire. “Sweep shot not good. Play straight.”

The dismissal has been a constant arm-wrestle between bat and ball, pragmatism and idealism, good practice and bad. At different points in time, an identical shot to an identical ball might be plumb leg-before or palpably not out. The Law giveth and the Law taketh away – sometimes in the same month. “When I went back to county cricket, I’d bowl the same ball that was plumb lbw in a Test match, and some umpires – usually the senior ones – would just bark ‘not out’,” says Graeme Swann, whose 255 Test wickets for England included 70 lbws. “I felt like saying: ‘No, seriously mate, trust me, that’s out. Did you not watch the Test match?’”

There was a one-stride-fits-all approach: if a batsman was well forward, he earned instant immunity. The stock response from umpires was that they would be “guessing”. Tufnell had heard this once too often in Trinidad in 1998 when he hit Shivnarine Chanderpaul’s magnetic front pad yet again. He turned round to appeal, only to find the umpire looking straight down at his ball counter. “Aren’t you even going to look?” “No, I’d be guessing.” “Yeah, but at least you might guess right…”

There had been hundreds of declined opportunities for guesswork at Edgbaston in 1957, when Peter May and Colin Cowdrey thwarted West Indies’ mystery spinner Sonny Ramadhin in more ways than one, kicking him away for a day and a half in a match-saving partnership of 411. The contest entered folklore, and is told almost as a pantomime, yet there was a human cost. The tactic was copied widely, and Ramadhin was never the same bowler. “They ruined my career,” he said.

Another West Indian found a novel solution. Michael Holding started life as an off-spinner, but soon realised it was a futile endeavour. As a teenager, he played a Jamaican variation of the game, catchy shubby: no lbw and, if a batter was caught, next in was the fielder. That meant Holding’s best hope of a bat was to hit the wicket – a sheet of corrugated iron. Exasperated with batters blocking him, he made it his mission to bowl so fast that nobody of sound mind would want to put their shinbones in the way. There was a flavour of catchy shubby in Holding’s greatest performance: 12 of the 14 English wickets he took at The Oval in 1976 were bowled or lbw.

The lbw Law, or lack thereof, gave Holding a new identity. It gave yet another West Indian a new name. Jimmy Adams did more than anyone to preserve his side’s long unbeaten record during a 1–1 draw in India in 1994/95, averaging 173, and 403 balls, per dismissal. Yet an epic performance was reduced to a sneering portmanteau: Jimmy Padams. Against a three-man spin attack, he redefined the forward defensive by thrusting his front pad at hundreds of deliveries. But his pad didn’t score any of his 520 runs. “I can’t remember when I first heard the name Jimmy Padams, but it never bothered me,” he said. “Those pitches ragged from day one. If I couldn’t reach the pitch and smother it, or sweep, I wasn’t prepared to hang my bat and hope for the best.” That, after all, would be guessing.

Three years later, he was given out lbw in both innings against England in Guyana, to Tufnell and Robert Croft. On both occasions Adams was defending behind his pad, well outside off stump, but umpire Hair gave an lbw decision from the future – earning his mention in Tufnell’s diary. Adams was immediately dropped. His dismissals feel like a symbolic moment in the battle between ball and pad.

The reality was more complex, not least because the first umpire to give Adams out that way had been the West Indian Steve Bucknor, against Australia three years earlier. Besides, Adams didn’t have a problem with Hair. “I always found Darrell approachable,” he says. “I thought he was a decent umpire. I didn’t feel aggrieved after Guyana – I was more upset with myself. My attitude was always: what could I have done differently to get a different outcome?” Adams adapted his game to great effect. CricViz data shows that, after Guyana, his Test average against spin topped 70.

Most players are lbw candidates at some point, perhaps when their head is falling over, or their mind scrambled. The department of run-making, as Graham Gooch once described his craft, was abruptly closed in 1989 when he asked to miss the Fifth Ashes Test after repeatedly getting trapped in front, mainly by Terry Alderman. Graffiti was apparently spotted on a toilet wall: “Thatcher Out!” And below it: “lbw b Alderman”.

Not that Gooch was alone. That summer, Alderman won 19 lbw shouts (20 if you include Thatcher); nobody else has taken more than 14 in a series. Some stick in the memory more than others. Take this quiz question: which Test batter has been lbw most often to the same bowler? Even Allan Lamb probably doesn’t know he’s the answer, having fallen seven times to Malcolm Marshall. All seven were in England – which was also where Lamb scored four of his six hundreds against West Indies. The lbws were decorative, not definitive.

At least Gooch only had to put up with apocryphal graffiti. Shane Watson suffered a spate of lbws during the birth of social media, accounting for 58 per cent, of his Ashes dismissals in England; in all other Tests, including against England at home, the figure dropped to 21%. At times, as Watson found himself caught between the devil and the DRS, solemnly contemplating whether to review the bleedin’ obvious, he could have been inhabiting a play by Samuel Beckett (who once won an lbw shout for Dublin University against Queen’s University, Belfast, at Ballynafeigh in 1924).

“True batsmen never believe they’re out,” says Swann. “Shane’s a great bloke, bless him, and he laughs about it now. Some of the lbws were so plumb. He’d always walk down the wicket with a quizzical expression, and you could see the bloke at the other end thinking: ‘Oh, for God’s sake.’ But if they were a junior player, they’d be reluctant to give him the bad news. We’d all be in a huddle, saying: ‘Go on, do it!’ When he went upstairs, we’d cheer along with the Barmy Army.”

Those periods can break even the toughest. England captain Charlotte Edwards went into a double white-ball series against India in 2012 in spectacular form, only to fall lbw to swing bowler Niranjana Nagarajan in four of her first five innings. The run started with a poor umpiring decision – inside edge, outside the line, no DRS – but took on a life of its own. England won both series, but Edwards totalled 44 in seven innings.

“I remember it vividly,” she says. “I had a stinker, and it was so tough mentally. Tours were very short back then, so if you were out of form it often lasted a whole series. Lbw can get in your head – you end up tinkering and thinking too much, which usually makes things worse.
When you’re in form, you just play on instinct.”

An lbw candidacy can mess with a batter’s sense of time, never mind their timing. In fact, the India series was short, with all seven innings  played in 16 days of intensive soul-searching, but for Edwards it “felt like a year”. She adds: “My personal pride ate away at me. I tried to deal with it myself during that India series. I was really worried, but I don’t think I would have told anyone that.”

Three months later, Edwards was Player of the Tournament at the T20 World Cup: “That says it all, doesn’t it.” And, that winter, she made a brilliant match-winning hundred against India at the 50-over World Cup, when she got on top of Nagarajan the bowler – only to be run out by Nagarajan the fielder. She never again struggled as she had in 2012. “I think that bad spell was good for me in the long run,” she says, “as a player and a coach.”

Every batter has known how Edwards and Watson have felt. Well, almost every batter. The Australian seamer Michael Hogan, who retired last year, batted 318 times in his professional career, and was never lbw. That feat was beyond even WG Grace, the great self-umpiring pioneer. Such statistical wonders are easily verifiable. In the 20th century, that wasn’t always the case, and myths grew easily, such as the claim that Javed Miandad was never lbw in a Test in Pakistan. In fact, he was – 11 per cent of the time, even if the first came nine years into his career, and the figure rose to 26 per cent away from home. But he was hardly alone: among contemporaries, Arjuna Ranatunga’s home and away percentages were five and 21, Desmond Haynes’s six and 21, David Gower’s 13 and 27. Earlier, Bill Lawry had 54 Test innings at home, and was never lbw.

But at least Javed had fun with it, often telling bowlers, with a mischievous smile, that he had got lucky. In 1988/89, on the first morning in Karachi, a fresh-faced Steve Waugh appealed unsuccessfully for lbw. Soon after, with Javed at the non-striker’s end, he offered Waugh some advice, just out of the umpire’s earshot. “What are you doing?” he said. “Don’t waste your time. This is my turf.”

Neutral officials were still a rarity in those days, and nothing fuelled suspicion quite like umpiring decisions. Mike Gatting’s spat with Shakoor Rana at Faisalabad in 1987/88 can probably be traced back to the previous Test, at Lahore, where Shakeel Khan gave him out almost before a ball from Abdul Qadir hit the pad. That it did so outside the line, while turning further away, didn’t help Anglo–Pakistan relations either. But nor did decisions such as one at Edgbaston in 1982, when Mudassar Nazar turned his back on a short ball from Ian Botham, and was given out leg-before. Never mind the knee-roll: Mudassar walked off rubbing his backside.

England’s complaints about Pakistani umpiring had an unlikely pay-off, when one of their few series wins of the era, against South Africa in 1998, was helped by Javed Akhtar giving them a raft of lbws – ranging from probably out to not in a thousand millennia – in the decider at Headingley. He was later accused of match-fixing by Ali Bacher, though a commission cleared him.

The injustice and entitlement that lbw decisions can create don’t usually offer scope for nuance. England didn’t get a single lbw when they  won the Ashes in Australia in 1970/71, though Australia gained only five in the six Tests. The series took place during a short-lived experiment whereby a batsman attempting a shot could be out only if the ball pitched in line with the stumps. In those days, many umpires wore a badge with pride: they were not-outers. Even a bowler with the surgical precision of Richard Hadlee struggled in his homeland. “For [Fred] Goodall to give someone out lbw,” he said, “it’s really got to be a full toss, on the toe, hitting middle.”

Some remain convinced England would have won the World Cup in both 1979 and 1992 had strong shouts been upheld in the final: Mike Hendrick to Viv Richards at Lord’s, and Derek Pringle, twice, to Javed Miandad at the MCG, with Bucknor the umpire. “I find it mildly amusing that people still bang on about it after more than 30 years,” says Pringle. Bucknor was less amused when they ran into each other soon after. “On my first gig as a journalist, in 1994, there was a cocktail party in Kingston before the first Test. I said to him, as a bit of an ice-breaker: ‘Is Javed still not out?’ He just turned on his heels.”

The appeals by Hendrick and Pringle weren’t mentioned in contemporary reports, but their legend grew – particularly in Pringle’s case, with the two deliveries easy to find online. After the game, he went to the Pakistan dressing-room, where Miandad touched his left leg: “Bad luck, Allah smiled on me today.” When Pringle, who had taken 3-22, moved from pitch to press box, his alternate life became a recurring joke: CBE, Brylcreem contract, married to Liz Hurley. Oh, and Player of the Match in a World Cup final.

The most lbw-allergic umpire in the modern era was probably Dickie Bird. His first autobiography, released in 1978, was proudly entitled Not Out. Seven years later, he published another book: That’s Out! His decision-making did not evolve quite so speedily, though for three days in April 1993 he went spectacularly off the rails. Bird was the neutral umpire for a Test between West Indies and Pakistan in Trinidad, and with Bucknor gave 17 lbws, then a Test record. His trigger-happiness came about after a chance meeting by the lifts of the Hilton Trinidad the night before the match. A rum-emboldened Mike Selvey, The Guardian’s cricket correspondent and former England seamer, told him how many more wickets he would have taken in his own career had Bird not been so “anally retentive”. For the next three days, Bird went on an adventure, starting when he gave two lbws in two balls: Carl Hooper was sent packing a millisecond after a delivery from Waqar Younis hit  his pad, before Junior Murray was despatched with such vigour that Bird nearly gave himself a side strain.

The pitch was fast and low, and almost all the lbws bear scrutiny, but it was a dramatic change of approach for an umpire who usually checked the back door was locked at least three times before leaving the house. After the game, Bird saw Selvey: “Michael, I remembered what you said. I saw the ball hit the pad, thought ‘That’s out’, and gave it. And no one grumbled at all. It were marvellous. A revelation.” But it were also stressful and, in the next Test, Bird gave only one lbw. The dismissal has always been as much about mindset as eyesight.

Where umpires were once split into outers and not-outers, there is now another binary distinction: right and wrong. The process began when Hawk-Eye’s ball-tracking technology, first used on television in the UK in 2001, predicted whether deliveries would have hit the stumps. The impact on the perception of umpires and viewers was not immediate, not even when DRS became the norm in the early 2010s. Bird called DRS “a stain on the game”, making umpiring “easy… they have nothing to do”. But eventually it gave us all new glasses, showing the stumps were bigger than we imagined – particularly for balls once deemed to be sliding down leg. YouTube rabbit holes are full of not-out decisions that don’t compute. The past is a foreign country: they give plumb lbws not out there.

Technology also gave finger-spin the kiss of life. For several years, orthodox slow bowlers were told they needed a doosra to survive at Test level. But DRS allowed bowlers such as Swann, Nathan Lyon and Rangana Herath to become giants of the game. “My wicket-taking ball,” boasted Herath, “is the arm ball.” When Monty Panesar became the first spinner to take five lbws in a Test innings, against West Indies in 2007, The Guardian’s David Hopps lamented that the new orthodoxy would tempt Panesar to “abandon art in favour of painting and decorating”.

Swann managed both, and estimates that painting and decorating paid about a third of the bills at Test level. He was nearly 30 when he made his debut, which meant almost all his career coincided with technology. “I could have played five Tests in my twenties and been dropped for ever,” he says. “One of the luckiest things about my career is that my second series was in the West Indies, where they had seven left-handers, they were using DRS, and none of the left-handers was called Brian Lara. We should all praise the Lord for DRS, especially spinners. Batters could get away with blue murder before that.” 

DRS has taken lbw back to 1774, forcing batters to use their bat. Two of Kevin Pietersen’s most spine-tingling innings, in Colombo and  Mumbai in 2012, were a result of his existential crisis against left-arm spin a couple of years earlier. It has also given players more to think about. Not even WG could have foreseen that players really would become their own umpires. In last summer’s women’s Ashes at Lord’s, Alyssa Healy walked before the umpire gave her lbw to Charlie Dean. Eleven days later, at Old Trafford, Zak Crawley was given out to Cameron Green for a painfully scratchy 20. He was confident it was missing leg, reviewed, and scorched his way to 189.

The lbw decision has moved from being an individual judgment, sometimes based on morality, to a scientific assessment. But the importance of umpire’s call – the final frontier in the move towards cold, computerised appraisals – means the human element remains integral. In the current system, the same delivery can be out or not out, an anomaly nobody has yet called Schrödinger’s Front Dog. Umpire’s call also safeguards one of the best things about lbw: the pregnant pause between appeal and verdict, when time stands still, and the doors start to slide. That moment of tension was heightened at the turn of the century by the emergence of umpires – Bucknor, Rudi Koertzen, Billy Bowden – who seemed to contemplate the meaning of life before raising the finger. They became lead characters in one of cricket’s greatest pieces of theatre.

Even in an era of technological precision, there is still doubt, mystery and a sense of injustice. Millions in Pakistan were aghast when technology gave Sachin Tendulkar not out in the 2011 World Cup semi-final at Mohali. Australia, meanwhile, were in the highest dudgeon when technology showed Ben Stokes should have been lbw to Lyon, with England needing two to win at Headingley in 2019. They foamed with impotent rage, and ignored the fact there was a reason they had no reviews left. Never mind right and wrong: the lbw has always been a vehicle of righteousness, and not even technology can eradicate that.

Rob Smyth is a freelance writer based in Somerset. He was never good enough to have an lbw problem.

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