Cricket question

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Jon_D
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I have tried to find the answer on Google but all the responses seem to be couched in jargon which I cannot understand.
Anyway here is my question. When I played cricket at school, the bowling crease was at the wicket. A bowler couldn’t bowl beyond that line. Now I see that the bowling crease (the line over which a bowler cannot step when bowling) , is now at the “popping crease” where the batsman stands. So shortening the distance he has to bowl. When and why was this moved?
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Probably the Eurocrats, they insisted the distance had to be metric, not feet and inches. :grin:
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I can't recall exactly when that law was changed - a good thirty years ago, or more. I'll try to find out. [Edit : it was in 1962!]

Anyway, under the 'old' law the umpire stared at the bowling crease to check the legality of the delivery. Once certain, he looked up to see what was happening at the striker's end ... by which time most events of significance had already happened! Judging LBWs correctly was therefore almost impossible when a fast bowler was on ; now, with DRS, we know that many LBWs weren't given previously because the umpire didn't have that extra fraction of a second to adjust his line of sight. Even with that change in the law, cameras revealed that a lot of no balls were still being missed, hence the recently-introduced hooter so that the third umpire can alert the standing umpires that they missed one!

Incidentally (if you didn't know) the 'popping crease' is so-called because long ago there wasn't a line drawn to indicate that a running batsman had made his ground or not. Instead, there was a shallow hole. The batsman had to 'pop' the toe of his bat into the hole before a fielder 'popped' the ball into it. I imagine that there were a lot of finger injuries sustained as a result!
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