Blind Cricketers are for Real
on George Hamilton (Jamaica), 19/Jul/2011 20:18, 34 days ago
After the routine, except for me, blog I'm returning to dangerous territory again. Grumpy Blog will have to keep an eye on me.I'm being deliberately vague on this one. Sometime in the past my wife, her friend and I had a good laugh about blind cricketers applying for visas to visit another country. Obviously it was a scam and they were illegal immigrants in disguise. However it turns out that if those blind cricket players are the same blind cricketers as the ones as below, then it was quite legitimate.Blind cricket does exist and it's alive and well in Jamaica as the article in today's Gleaner confirmed. How could I resist doing a blog on this when there is opportunity for cracking some jokes, but obviously not at the players' expense. At his stage I had not read the rules of blind cricket so I was still in the dark. Sorry, that was my unintentional joke.Here comes the intentional joke after a tiny bit of scene setting for all those who have no idea what cricket is. I have left out a lot of details so cricket fans should go easy on me.Essentially the wicket is to cricket what home base is to baseball. Similarly the bowler and the pitcher are one and the same. A divergence between cricket and baseball is that there's no three strikes in cricket and you're out. Cricket only has one strike and if you miss the ball and it hits the wicket then you are out.But what happens if the ball would have hit the wicket but conveniently your legs got in the way? Can you escape being out - after all the ball did not hit the wicket? The answer is no because the bowler may seek confirmation from the umpire that the ball would have hit the wicket. The umpire is the person standing behind the bowler's wicket. He's the person in the cap in the picture above.Here is some potential business for the Dispute Resolution Foundation except that the cricket umpire's decision is meant to be final. But not always these days well after I stopped playing cricket, and only at the very highest level.Here's a situation that needs some dispute resolution:Sometimes there can be disputes between the bowler's opinion that the ball would have hypothetically hit the wicket and the umpires view that it wouldn't have. In the normal sighted cricket the agrieved bowler might rudely ask the umpire if he was blind or something, so I thought it would be just as fair for a ripped off blind bowler to ask the umpire whether the latter was sighted or something.Unfortunately jokes that are a long time coming aren't as funny as the spontaneous ones. You may have missed it.The rules of blind cricket are based on the standard Laws of cricket with some essential modifications but some of the equipment is bigger to make it more visible, and the ball has bearing inside it to give it an audible feature for the completely blind blind player. Not all blind players are completely blind. Many blind people can see some things but not as well as you or me - they are partially sighted.This gentleman is blind too but probably does not play cricket.I would like to thank my picture sources gleaner.com, activeplaces.com.au, http://www.transitgallery.ca/stevemazza.html, mossavi.wordsource.comSteve Mazza is my nephew and a talented sculptor in Hamilton, Ontario.The Blog is good today - my jokes in a blind context must have been perfectly fine.