Why Leg Byes?
For the last 100 years, cricket scorers have been differentiating between byes and leg-byes, obviously in an effort to satisfy the vanity of wicketkeepers who dislike being saddled with runs for which they are not responsible A hundred years is not particularly long in the history of cricket, but it is a considerable period for so peculiar a situation to have survived. There seems no good reason why leg-byes should be scored at all. They cannot be scored deliberately: a modern rule expressly forbids the intentional deflection by the pad from yielding runs. Leg-byes are accidents: the batsmen do not earn them, nor should the fielding side be penalised for the inadvertently deflected ball. Certainly they occur, as a rule, when a bowler has beaten the batsman —yet the batting side profits. If leg-byes were done away with, it would be much fairer to both batsman and bowler, and there is only one point in favour of their retention. With modern cricket producing runs with little less difficulty than that with which the pyramids were built, cricket's legislators would obviously be unwilling to reduce the scoring rate.
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Bibliographic details
Press, Volume XCIII, Issue 28008, 30 June 1956, Page 3
Word Count
190Why Leg Byes? Press, Volume XCIII, Issue 28008, 30 June 1956, Page 3
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