When similar shifts in balance took place in baseball, the authorities responded with measures like changing the height of the pitcher’s mound or the size of the strikezone. And while there have been such regulations in cricket as well over the decades, such as the changes in the no-ball rule and the lbw rule, recent changes, such as the introduction of powerplays and the supersub, have just made the game more batsman-friendly. How could the rules be changed to tilt this balance back? One suggestion made on a TV show recently by the essayist Mukul Kesavan: remove the limit on overs that a bowler can bowl in an ODI. There is no limit on how much a batsman can bat within the 50 overs, so why should there be limits for bowlers?

It could be argued that changes in regulations will have a limited effect, and that this dominance of batsmen was inevitable. Sportsmen and their methods evolve in every sport, and in cricket there is far more scope for batting to evolve than for bowling. Bowlers have reached the human threshold of how fast one can bowl the ball, at about 100mph. Their equipment isn’t changing either, and there are few new tricks one can learn with that round piece of leather – reverse swing was the last significant innovation.

Batting, on the other hand, is mainly about skill, and considerable evolution has taken place in the way batsmen play in the last 15 years. The rise of the one-day game, which required urgency and innovation, has been partly responsible for this: in the game that Rip woke up to watch, Roger Telemachus swept fast bowler Nathan Bracken for four. You wouldn’t have seen that 20 years ago.

The equipment that batsmen use has evolved as well. In that game, immediately after Graeme Smith was out, Herschelle Gibbs swept a six off the toe of his bat. Perfect strokeplay is no longer a prerequisite for fast scoring.

More than this, a batsman-friendly game is perfectly suited to the times, in which the number of casual viewers of the sport has grown massively, and the lust for spectacle has overcome a love of contest. Twenty20 is ideally suited to this age of the short attention span, and the values of this new form of cricket will transform the older forms in much the same way one-day cricket changed Test cricket. Thus, even as more runs are scored, Test matches will end faster; and more and more teams will cross 400 in one-day cricket. Audiences love this, it could be asked, so why change it?

Tough questions, all of these. The discussion begins soon, and Bob Woolmer takes first strike.

Let the junta enjoy their Twenty20. get nekkid cheerleaders in, sure. in fact, do away with 50overs completely:if we indeed HAVE to make a choice betwen the pure game and the bastardized game, let's bastardize it all the way.

but please, for real tests, LET'S SEE SOME BLOOD ON THE PITCH, please.
And let bowlers choose their own ball-be it the Reader, the SG or whatever they prefer to get wickets. It's only just.

The more slogfests we see, the more unruly crowds we'll have to tolerate, the crowd that throws plastic bottles whenever 3 maidens in a row are bowled.

IMO, most genuine lovers of the game equaaly appreciate a 120 allout as a 397-4 as long as the characters are there to enact gripping drama.

What it could also be said is that , with the advancements in the making of bats which come lighter with sweet spots covering most of it, batting has evolved and is far driving the rapidness of the game.

But that should raise a question? Where are the innovations in the bowling department? The one thing that comes to any ones mind is biomechanics.. ofcourse it helps both the batsmen and the bowlers breed. The bowlers today are monitored colsely for their movements and thereby advised to change accordingly so as to increase the effectiveness of their bowling and thus become less injury prone...
What else apart from that?

The news that has been flying around is that an indian scientist in NASA has researched on cricket balls and came out with something useful which James Anderson and his party have used to good effect in the recent Test Match at Mumbai by trapping guys like Virender Sehwag infront.

So is this something bowlers can munch on ? Is this something that covers the offset that exists between the batsmen and the bowlers in cricket today?

Well time should be able to tell.

Boss...no need to change much...just ensure that the pitches are not dead even before the openers walk out to bat.

And about Kesavan's suggestion for unlimited bowling...well each of them has its downside, and it would be exploited 'in favour of batting'. Like for this one, teams would start playing 2-3 bowlers and 8-9 batsmen!!

Anyway, lots of better suggestions are possible, but I would stick with simplest, let the pitches be more balanced.

"Batting, on the other hand, is mainly about skill"

While I generally agree that something needs to be done, I wanted to add that
1. Let's not forget that bowlers too have had the time to improve skill, and bowlers like Murli, Warne, McGrath etc have displayed enough of it in the recent past. There is no excuse for bad bowling, which was rife at 'the ODI being discussed'.
2. I think a cartwheeling middle stump is as audience friendly as any site in any game.

Maybe someone can design a ball that keeps its seam for longer or a ball that is better designed to swing. This way bowling technology can keep up with batting technology

Cricket being a 40 or a 20 ball game depending on whether you are playing Test Cricket or ODI, the scales will and should always be a little loaded in the batsman's favour, but this complete domination of batsmen over bowlers is indeed worrying. Rip might still wake up 20 years hence and see a McGrath clone belting a double century from No.11!
But seriously, there is a genuine dearth of menacing fast bowlers. The only one in the last 15 years has been Allan Donald who by some definition could put the fear of god into a batsman who is armed today with the modern 'weapon of destruction'.
a) The Kookaburra should be put in a museum and only Duke or SG be allowed.
b) In ODIs Helmets should be banned, with one bouncer allowed per over, Telemachuses and Van der Wirths be warned!
c) The graphite or any substance other than wood be disqualified for use in a bat.
d) The sweet spot which is now the whole bat be restored to earlier levels which was 3-4 inches in diameter in our or Cricketing Rip's time.
e) One lbw rule should change. Even if the batsman is attempting a shot and is hit on the pad outside the line of off-stump, he should be given out if the ball is heading towards the stump.
The above will take care to shift the balance from 90-10 to 65-35 in batsman's favour.
f) If it's not the usual England hype, 'Contrast' Swing be encouraged further, which supposedly helped England to ambush India at the Wankhede!Unfortunately i lamented on this state of affairs, long before in my blog, but who is there to listen to a layman!!!!!!!!!

Its too early to take any drastic step coz of just one match of madness, experimenting with rules will do no good, like supersub proved to be super-flop.
Well, consistentancy is the need of hour, specially in terms of ground size and type of ball used, some records like fasted 100 was made in smallest ground or like NZ feasted on small home grounds in 92 WC.
I'm sure result would have been different if SA-Aussie played that match at SCG or MCG :-)

The game already favours the batsmen specially the ODI's. scores of 400 don't provide an exciting contest if all conditions are tailor-made for batters. that is simply not cricket. it's the sixes show & you don't need cricketers to perform it. if it's the money get some people, give them bats & just tell them to hit.
it's a disgrace this 20twenty nonsense. it's child play & just a commercial product to bring in those bags of money.

Just want to say that there should be some standard for preparing pitches even in ODIs. Kokabura should be thrown away. Balls that can swing a little more should be made. Good bowlers will continue to emerge. No need to worry about the balance. Because batsman always has a fear of being out in his mind. Bowler has the psychological advantage.

The new era has definitely made cricket more enjoyable (not that it wasn't) and I feel that more than the flat tracks and the "non-swinging" cricket balls, its the batsmen who have adapted to the situation and sensed the need to score at fast rates to win a limited-over match, of course with a little help from Mr. Technology to plan their strategies against different bowlers. The Aus vs SA match was nothing but a freaky game and I think all would agree that we are not going to see something like that too often, if not ever. As was mentioned about bowling, coaches can maybe put in more effort in analysing a batsman's weakness and communicate them in such a way that the bowlers can adapt too.
Test match cricket as it is, holds too much at stake for a batsman to try new things and play pre-meditated shots and so bowlers have a larger window to be successful if they really have potential to get a correct batsman out. It takes skill, focus, determination and fearless vision to bat in the test arena because luck or flamboyance will not take you too far down the road. So regardless of the cricket ball, it depends on the individual who delivers it. Just my two cents...

One of the astonishing results of innovations such as hawk-eye and the 'snickometer' are the amount of appeals where the batsman is incorrectly given the benefit of the doubt. Where there is doubt Umpires tend to err almost exclusively towards the side of the batsman. In particular I am positive that spinners receive far fewer lbw decisions than they did 20 years ago. In view of this Duncan Fletcher's suggestion for the fielding side to have the right of referral on a limited number of appeals during a match could go some way to redressing the balance.

The rules of the game, and the game itself should be modified to allow players of all ages, and levels to play and enjoy the game. Cricket should not only be a spectator sport, but a participatory one, to increase the enjoyment of the game. For instance, there would be nothing wrong in gloves being allowed for fielding, or different types of balls used for amateur players not playing professional cricket..

There is one obvious way the ICC has bent over backwards to help "bowlers" -the so called 15 degree throqing tolerence rule which allows some people to continue playing Test cricket using actions which would have been traditionally considered (and rightly so) illegal in the past.

I have grown up and now live in two different places in terms of cricket- the first, in my younger days (despite me being 15), was where the fixation on massive scores was not as apparent, where we could savour the relatively occasional six or three-hundred plus score, and patience was a pre-requisite in both test and (slightly) odi cricket. the second is of today- where i see myself surrounded by people who want twenty-20 action streched over 50 overs. there are few patient people of my age now (in coventry, england leastways), and none that i myself know that watch test cricket for five days at 2 or 3 runs an over. so let them have twenty20, but let odi at least be somewhere in the middle of test and twenty-20 cricket. i know many people will say it, but odi's should still be a contest- cricket is a game of bat and ball isnt it? isn't a gripping chase- on a pitch offering immense swing and seam, with a bowler fast and glorious surging in- of 220, in which the final delievery decides the result much more thrilling and satisfying than an 800-odd-run-"game." Bowling should, be 'explosive' as well shouldn't it? I know I would rather wish to see Wasim Akram and Waqar Younis on a green-top having a battle with a class batsmen in an odi, rather than seeing Herschelle gibbs smacking around Mick Lewis...

For all the talk of the bat dominating the ball(its not just talk but a fact), we have seen games where the bowlers made the batsman look wholly inadequate even if it was for relatively short periods. Case in point the underated Indian seamers steamrolling the Pakistani top order in the Karachi test and Pakistani bowlers returning the compliment.
In one day cricket preparing flat tracks is fine since the result is assured, this does'nt apply to tests. Where a flat track means a dull and dreary draw. There have to be two sets of standadrds for each version of the game.

Andrew Moore

regarding the umpires favouring the batsmen, well stop me if I'm wrong, but haven't they ALWAYS had to?

What are you people on about? It's not like EVERY match is seeing 800 runs scored! There's no reason to fundamentally change the sport just because ONE 20/20 game ran over to a 50/50.

There's plenty of low-scoring matches being played, a couple of them in the last week. People with short attention spans should be complaining about the dominance of the ball, and asking how to tilt the game back towards batsmen again.

I think it was the greatest game I have seen. Many reasons first one is rivalry that was spurring betn two teams. Second Series level @ 2-2. Remember you're fighting the best team in world Aus. I felt like vomiting when Aus batsmen were butchering SA bowlers. I asked GOD for mercy for so called Chokers. I understand it was Bat n Bat contest but how fair is the game when there are 10 batsmen to survive 300 deliveries and 10 ways to get out with humans(Umpires) to decide their fate at many occasions.