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2019 Cricket World Cup semi-final, Australia v England
Don’t know if you heard, but England hammerthrashed Australia in the World Cup semi-final today.
A World Cup semi-final is an emotional thing and a hammerthrashing like this is even more emotional still.
The most emotional moment came when England’s Jason Roy was given out. Many people were involved. Let’s try and work out who was most emotional about it?
The Australia players
When you get someone out, it’s almost always a very emotional thing. However, while this was a big wicket in a World Cup semi-final, Australia were already highly likely to lose by this point, so they didn’t feel as strongly about it as they otherwise might have done.
Jason Roy’s wicket wasn’t a thing that made the Australia players think, “This is match-turning.” It was more like a thing where if they subsequently took a bunch more wickets, they’d later think, “That wicket earlier on turned out to be match-turning with hindsight.” We’re sure you’ll agree, that kind of thought is unlikely to elicit quite the same emotional response.
The Australia players did have a secondary emotional response though. They also felt slightly irritated when Jason Roy didn’t want to walk off the pitch.
Emotion rating: 6/10
Jonny Bairstow
A little earlier in England’s innings, Jonny Bairstow had been given out. Even though he was very clearly completely out, he decided to use England’s one review because he apparently thought that through magic there was maybe some way he might not be out.
Turned out Jonny Bairstow was indeed completely out and England then had no more reviews to use because you don’t let people who review dismissals like Jonny Bairstow’s have more than one review because otherwise the game would take an eternity.
The TV coverage showed that Jason Roy was very definitely not out and Jason Roy made it very clear that he would very much like to have reviewed the decision. Jonny Bairstow may well have felt a certain amount of guilt about this and guilty is a very powerful emotion.
Emotion rating: 7/10
Jason Roy
Upon being given out, Jason Roy had what can only be described as a mega-strop. He made a disbelieving face at the umpires. He ‘remonstrated’. He said things. He swished his bat.
Jason Roy was a very, very unhappy man.
Not being unable to review what was pretty clearly a full-on wrong decision was very frustrating for Roy, but somewhere in the back of his mind a very small part of him may have acknowledged that he was right there when Jonny Bairstow had said, “Should I review this?” and he had utterly failed to say, “You’re having a laugh, aren’t you?”
Emotion rating: 9/10
Umpire Dharmasena
Have you ever done something moronically stupid that has massively upset someone? Let’s say you pulled out of a junction having somehow not seen an oncoming vehicle and the driver had to do an emergency stop.
They’re angry. They’re super-angry. They’re enraged and it’s completely justified. This incident was 100 per cent your fault and you’re a complete dick. All you can really do in this situation is just have them be angry at you until they run out of anger and eventually drive away again.
That is a horrible feeling; that feeling that someone is hugely, unnecessarily emotional and it’s wholly your fault. That is basically how umpire Dharmasena must have felt after seeing his dismissal finger rise in front of his face when Jason Roy hadn’t hit the ball.
Just put yourself in umpire Dharmasena’s position. As Jason Roy threshes around, his dreams of a megafun World Cup hundred lying in shards around him, you realise this shouldn’t have happened and that the only reason it has happened is because of you. Then you realise millions of people are watching and they think you’re a complete tool.
Jason’s not getting any less angry. The crowd aren’t happy. You can feel your stomach ferreting around for a way to get out of your body. And then you realise you have to carry on doing this decision-making-in-front-of-millions-of-people thing for a couple more hours yet.
Emotion rating: 10/10
You bottleless get Dharmasena. You dickhead. That were absolute diabolical.
I can’t spake – would that Jason Roy had been similarly afflicted.
“Not being unable to review”… oh dear.
I did once make a shocking umpiring decision in a school match, made all the more shocking by the fact that the lad in question was a mate of mine.
My excuse, not that there is one, was that it was a hot sunny day and I was umpiring hatless.
My response to the episode was to pass out a few balls later and sick-bayed with a fever in the “borderline dangerous” levels of body temperature. 24 hours later I was fully restored. I’ll try to find it in the diary – I’m guessing summer of 1979.
What a tantrum from the Surrey man. But who cares. Cricket!
I taped the 2003 World Cup final on VHS and watched it again and again. Ponting’s innings that day was like nothing I had ever seen. Watching the highlights of today’s game felt similar to that. Roy’s third six off Smith, which looked like it went straight into Cannon Hill Park, through the Midlands Arts Centre and up to Cadbury World, was quite astonishing.
In summary, bring back VHS. And BHS.
Not that anyone is counting, but I may as well admit that I was talking complete bollock a few posts back, when I lamented that however far England had progressed, they still weren’t capable of winning a crunch match in a big tournament. Or whatever I said… anyway, I am very happy to have to eat those words now (with a nice glass of Aussie red, which was not deliberate, but seems peculiarly apposite). Yum yum
Stuart Broad would’ve walked.
…..over water, holding his papa’s hand.
The whole reviews thing is poorly implemented. Why the players should have to challenge decisions instead of a VAR like monitoring of them in the background, I don’t know.
Cricket has a history of poorly implemented good ideas. See the substitute rule, for the short time it existed. Having to name 11 players before the toss almost always resulted in the team losing the toss using their sub before the game started.
Agree completely.
Why is nobody giving the other side of this story, which is that Umpire Dharmasena was right? Jason Roy hit the ball.
The thing is, the Laws of Cricket haven’t really adapted to the Rutherford-Bohr model of the atom, and have ignored Quantum Mechanical models completely. The outer shell electrons of all atoms, being negatively charged, repel the electrons of any neighbouring atom via the exchange of force mediating particles. For any electromagnetic interaction, those particles are photons, known more commonly as the indivisible and massless wave packets that constitute light. The outer layer of atoms in both the bat and the ball is likely to be carbon, which has a mean radius of 70 picometers, and the typical atomic spacing in any solid lattice is of the order of several angstroms.
In other words, the masses come nowhere near each other, and all that happens is that some photons are exchanged. And what did people say when they saw the replay? Yep, that they could see DAYLIGHT between the bat and the ball. That is, they could see photons between the bat and the ball, which is EXACTLY as one would expect in the case when, in the naïve sense, the bat touches the ball. You’re OUT Jason Roy, as out as it’s possible to be.
But wait. Because the photons travel at the speed of light, the only things the ball is not interacting with are those objects outside its future light cone. We need a cut-off time, so let’s say one hundredth of a second. That means the ball is “touching” everything inside a 3,000km radius.
In other words, Jason Roy was NOT OUT. The ball bounced (interacted with the ground).
So he simultaneously hit a 4 (the ball interacted with the boundary rope, but also the ground), narrowly avoided playing on (the ball interacted with the stumps, but the bails failed to be dislodged… again) and was also close to being out LBW (the ball interacted with his legs, but luckily it was umpires call due to being within 1,000km either way)?
I know, because I was within 3,000km of Edgbaston yesterday, so I was there.
Thanks Bert.
We can always rely on you to bring clarity to a situation with maths and/or physics.
Sunday. brunch. with. ROB. KEY.
Lest we forget thee, oh first class cricket:
http://ianlouisharris.com/2019/07/09/a-day-of-sport-in-exile-mostly-middlesex-v-gloucestershire-at-merchant-taylors-school-9-july-2019/
Such an exciting, concluding day three of county championship cricket.
Somerset and second place. A timeless tale of unrequited love.