One of the great truths of sport, whether you have played it at international level or are a passionate spectator, is that the game is always easier from ninety yards away. It is true for two reasons. Quite apart from the fact that you don’t actually have to play the ball or bowl it, your decision is not put to test. A batsman, or a bowler or, particularly, the captain has to take a decision and either bear the brunt of its failure or bask in its success. Watching from ninety yards away, you can be wrong but that doesn’t impact anything.

That is why I have a touch of sympathy, only a touch, for Paul Collingwood. He wanted to win, that is the reason you must play sport, and on the spur of the moment he took a decision that he thought would help his side to win. Upto that point, his action could be understood and I am willing to stick my neck out to say that a lot of cricketers would have done precisely the same thing. But, in a fine piece of umpiring, he was offered the option to change his mind and that is when the ability to be calm, such an integral part of leadership, should have risen to the surface. That is when he should have recalled Grant Elliott.

So, maybe we should start putting this in the rules as well; that if a player is brought down, intentionally or otherwise, and as a result of the act he cannot complete a run, the ball becomes dead; assuming of course that a catch wasn’t being taken somewhere else at the same time. (I can see other implications here: what if it is the last ball with one to win and you bring the batsman down? This argument is more about the spirit than about the letter of the law!)

... contd.