Sanjay Manjrekar slams free hit and leg bye rules
Manjrekar spoke against the leg-byes saying that the bowlers shouldn’t be punished for bowling a good delivery. There’s no doubt that the game of cricket has been massively tweaked in the favor of the batters over the years. With the rules like umpires call, shorter field restrictions, leg byes, longer field restrictions, the bowlers have little to no room for any kind of errors and are punished for making even the slightest of mistakes with the ball.
The former Indian cricketer Sanjay Manjrekar expressed his solidarity with the bowlers as he claimed that rules like byes and free hits are highly unfair for the bowlers. Speaking about the rule of free hit, Manjrekar reckoned that even if a bowler oversteps by a few inches, he has to bowl an extra ball and the batter cannot be dismissed on that.
The veteran asserted that it seems like the free hit rule is made by a sadist who hated the bowlers.
“Free hit is a thing I want gone, again terribly unfair on the bowlers. Today with the TV umpire monitoring no balls, a bowler has to be a centimeter over, and immediately a string of punishments are meted out,” Manjrekar wrote in his column for Hindustan Times.
How does that make sense from any angle?: Sanjay Manjrekar
“The bowler has to bowl an extra ball, the batter cannot be out to that no ball already bowled and there is also a penalty of one run. To add to that, there is a free hit offered to the batter next ball in which he cannot be out. The penalty is just not commensurate to the ‘wrongful’ act. It’s as if the rule was introduced by a sadist who hated bowlers,” he added.
Further, Manjrekar spoke against the leg-byes saying that the bowlers shouldn’t be punished for bowling a good delivery that manages to deceive the batsman and goes past him after touching his body part. The 55-year-old feels that it doesn’t make sense to give free leg-by runs to the batters.
“We see a bowler has bowled a great delivery and the batter is deceived, can’t put bat to ball. But the ball brushes to the fine leg boundary. Umpire signals four, in favor of the batting team! Batter rewarded, bowler penalized. How does that make sense from any angle?” Manjrekar asserted.
