N ot least among the charms of international cricket are the ceremonials contained therein. The taking of the second (and occasionally third) new ball always appears to take on a sacramental element as the umpire holds it aloft reverentially before handing it to the bowler. And then there is the toss. Other than cricket, is there any other sport in which the flip of a coin is such a high-profile part of the preliminaries? In football or rugby there is a toss, but the teams apart, does anyone really pay it any mind? The toss before the Boat Race has a consequence in deciding which of the Surrey or Middlesex station the crews take. But beyond that?
For international cricket, it becomes an event in its own right: a cast of thousands on the middle these days, it seems; a match referee who hands the coin to the home captain, blazered and capped, who flips it. Then the anticipation as, before the result is announced, the successful captain approaches the microphone to convey it to the television audience. Bat or field? And why? Sometimes the crowd cheer the result: occasionally they drown out the proceedings.
Before the 2011 World Cup final in Mumbai , the match referee, Jeff Crowe, instructed the Sri Lanka captain, Kumar Sangakkara, to call loudly because of the cacophonous noise from 60,000 fans. Sangakkara offered instead a quiet, ambiguous call that sounded to Crowe something like “hedtails”. “You have just done what I asked you not to do,” said an exasperated Crowe. “We are going to have to toss again.” There was controversy before a ball was bowled.
Now, though, in the aftermath of an extraordinary Ashes, the shortest five-match series ever in terms of sessions, in which fortunes switchbacked, there are calls to do away with the toss as a means of deciding who bats first. Pitches during the series were “doctored”, apparently, which seems an emotive term for leaving a bit more grass on, and never mind the fact home advantage has always been a factor and the last thing we surely want are homogenous surfaces. So to avoid such things, the suggestion is always to give visiting captains choice, as if offering courtesy shots for golfers playing unfamiliar courses (or at least, in a watered down form, alternate the decision from match to match, although how this would eliminate ‘doctoring’ half the time is not explained).
But do we not make too much of the toss in any case? Pitch reading is an inexact science even by the best and all too often captains are ambivalent, sometimes conducting the toss with fingers metaphorically crossed that they might not have to make the decision and risk castigation for a possible bad outcome in the match.
Here is how inexact it can be: for each match, in a preview, I am required to offer a brief, moderately informed assessment of the pitch and what a captain might be thinking, even though it is 24 hours before the game and I might not have been close to the surface in any case. In the seven Tests this summer, I countenanced fielding at Lord’s (sappy May conditions), was ambivalent at Headingley depending on the weather (there was a late start and both captains were equally ambivalent), would have batted first in Cardiff, and at Lord’s, fielded first at Edgbaston, batted at Trent Bridge (“while mindful batting could be a struggle”) and batted at the Kia Oval.
Against this, Brendon McCullum fielded at Lords and lost the match ; Alastair Cook fielded at Headingley and lost the match ; Cook batted and won in Cardiff ; Michael Clarke batted and won at Lord’s; Australia batted at Edgbaston and were bowled out for 136 ; England fielded at Trent Bridge ( and we know what happened there ); and Cook fielded at the Kia Oval and lost by an innings . So three out of seven times the team winning the toss won the match and four times lost (using my assessment, it would have been five wins, one loss, and one ambivalent).
To me this just reinforces a point made by Raymond Illingworth, who said that in any season (of maybe 35 matches or more) he perhaps wanted to win half a dozen tosses and the rest did not matter. In the most simplistic terms, this would seem to be borne out by some statistics.
Just to take England and Australia: in all Test matches, England have won toss and match 171 times and Australia 198; and they have lost the toss and won 173 and 168 times respectively. Against that England have won the toss and lost 120 times against Australia’s 102; and they have both lost toss and match 106 and 159 times respectively. So overall, England have won more times losing the toss than winning it and Australia not a significant difference between the two scenarios.
A lot of this would have been with, for example, uncovered pitches. So take the last 10 years instead. Win toss and match: England 27, Australia 34; lost toss and win, England 28, Australia 30; win toss and lose, England 20, Australia 15; lose toss and lose, England 19, Australia 17.
I would postulate that the toss is as much a part of the pageantry of the game as practical. But the fundamental point remains that for the most part it makes little if any difference to the outcome. It is the least of the game’s concerns.
Loading comments…