Langeveldt said:
Do you think cricket is the sport where the venue and climate can have most impact on the outcome of the match, out of any sport??
Nope. Maybe it's true of team sports, but I would have to say that the outcome of most golf tournaments is even more dependent on conditions than most cricket matches. Not that I have anything much to say in favour of golf, which even at its best only matches the existential excitement of a Chris Tavare Test innings, but you'd have to say that it is played in an even more challenging range of conditions than cricket is. And the choice of venue is even more crucial - at least cricket fields would all be represented pretty similarly on relief maps, which cannot be said about the rolling hills of a challenging links course.
I was just thinking about my various objections to golf as a spectator sport, and found myself thinking about ski racing, whether downhill or slalom, and came to the conclusion that that also is a sport where the conditions matter a hell of a lot, and may even have more influence on the result than in cricket.
But I can't think of another team sport which is as dependent on conditions as cricket.
However, that may be a superficial analysis.
A work colleague was a Premiership referee until they went fulltime professional, and he had some interesting things to say about home advantage which were certainly not apparent to me as a relative football-hater. Soccer's rules about pitch dimensions only really specify that the pitch must be longer than it is wide - and there are clubs which will mark a narrow pitch when their opponents base their play on going wide and crossing and have a wide pitch when their opponents like to play down the middle so that they can outflank them or at least spread them out and make the short passing game difficult. And the length of the grass on a football pitch makes a lot more difference to styles of play than you might think.
That's not to say that football is as variable as cricket - I merely offer it as evidence that we self-satisfied cricket fans who know that we follow the finest sport there is don't necessarily appreciate the complexities at the top levels of other games.
But there was something he said which I found very relevant to cricket. They've had "neutral" referees in football for decades, almost centuries - certainly longer than in cricket, where we can see the fading photographs of teams only 90-100 years ago who had their own travelling umpire. And there had been analysis done which showed that there was something like a 10% bias in favour of the home team on marginal refereeing decisions, and none of the whistle-carriers could explain it in terms of their own thought processes, and my colleague was of the opinion that however much they tried to shut out the crowd, in reality they could not avoid being pushed by them, at least at a subliminal level.
I remember Mike Gatting complaining after a one-day Final, I think against Essex, that it had felt like playing away - and this was Lord's, where Middx play their home matches. To what extent, I wonder, were the Barmy Army responsible for the rather pathetic show some of the Windian batsmen put up in the Test series just gone?
So I don't think that " the conditions" are restricted to the weather and the nature of the grass on the field of play.
Cheers,
Mike
