Cricket’s most frustrating stoppage reared its head in Sydney on Wednesday with the third Test stopped on day one for bad light before it was even 2.30pm local time.
Gloomy skies above the SCG saw play between Australia and South Africa come to a halt barely halfway through the day, setting a baseline reading that would be difficult to meet later in the afternoon for play to resume.
Rain ultimately complicated the situation further, but not before cricket legends weighed in on whether players should have been off the ground anyway so early in the day.
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Under the rules, play cannot resume until the umpires’ light meter reading is better than what it was when play was first called off.
Kerry O’Keeffe flagged that there was sure to be “conjecture” later in the day over the decision, given it came so early in the afternoon when light is generally better.
“Sometimes it can give you a false impression of how dark it is. But this is the reading for the rest of the game, in the middle of the afternoon,” he said.
And indeed that situation came to pass.
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At 3.45pm, play was set to resume with the rain holding off, but the lighting proved to be worse than it was over an hour ago.
Players were waiting on the sidelines having warmed up again, but the umpires turned around and waved them off.
“You’re relying on the machinery to guide what happens moving forward,” Ian Smith noted at the time.
Mark Waugh felt that it wasn’t dark enough for play to be deemed as dangerous when bad light was initially called.
He said that play should have continued given the lights at the ground were turned on.
“I’d like to change the rules. I’m saying once the lights are on we stay on, simple as that,” Waugh said on Fox Cricket.
“I really don’t understand. If it was a pink ball, we’d be on there, if it was a red ball, ok it’s not perfect, it’s an outdoor sport, sometimes the light favours one side over the other.”
He added: “The ICC need to look at the crowd here, there’s 30,000 people here. Did Australia look like they couldn’t see the ball when they were batting? I think they saw it ok.
“Lights are on, we stay on. Simple.
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“There’s no way we should have went off when we did … I just think we’ve got to change our way of thinking.”
Meanwhile, Shaun Pollock lamented the fact that in a pink ball match, the same lighting conditions would have been deemed as safe.
Nonetheless, the rigidity in cricket’s laws means a red ball — which is harder to see — cannot be changed for a pink one midgame.
“It is funny in the game we play that you change it to a pink ball and we keep going. It’s just the nature of the beast,” he said.
“You kind of think, well, keep developing the pink ball to make it perform exactly like the red ball at all times, and then you’ve solved that problem forever and a day.”
Allan Border walked out into the middle of the ground during the delay and said he didn’t feel like it was too dark to bat.
He added: “The current light rule is too soft. We come off too easily.
“I think it’s something the game has to look at much more closely.”
