That is why I have a touch of sympathy, only a touch, for Paul Collingwood. He wanted to win, that is the reason you must play sport, and on the spur of the moment he took a decision that he thought would help his side to win. Upto that point, his action could be understood and I am willing to stick my neck out to say that a lot of cricketers would have done precisely the same thing. But, in a fine piece of umpiring, he was offered the option to change his mind and that is when the ability to be calm, such an integral part of leadership, should have risen to the surface. That is when he should have recalled Grant Elliott.

So, maybe we should start putting this in the rules as well; that if a player is brought down, intentionally or otherwise, and as a result of the act he cannot complete a run, the ball becomes dead; assuming of course that a catch wasn’t being taken somewhere else at the same time. (I can see other implications here: what if it is the last ball with one to win and you bring the batsman down? This argument is more about the spirit than about the letter of the law!)

I also believe the ICC needs to take a very firm view on switch-hitting. When the MCC, the guardians of the law and the spirit of the game (and surely that has to be wrong—it has to be the ICC, not the MCC), say it is okay for Kevin Pietersen to change his grip, and effectively become a left hander, they are letting the bowler down. And lest we forget, for we do so too often, the bowler is an equal shareholder in the game of cricket. At the heart of our game lies the contest between bat and ball and when that is imperiled, the game is imperiled.

There are rules to bowling and batting. When the bowler delivers a ball he is presenting the batsman with a challenge. The basis of this challenge, which can never change, is the line and length he has chosen and the field he has set. These are the cards he holds. The batsman now has to respond to this challenge by offering a shot. If the field is moved in the process of the ball reaching the batsman, it is unfair on him because the goalposts are being moved, the challenge is being amended, without him being aware of it. That is why it is against the spirit of the game to do it. So, just as the batsman enjoys the security of a fixed challenge, so must the bowler. If the batsman alters the foundation on which the challenge has been presented to him, he is wrong and he must be stopped.

That is why a right-handed batsman must remain a right-handed batsman. If he becomes a left-handed batsman after the ball has been delivered, he is conning the bowler and because the bowler delivers his cards first, he has no comeback. That is unfair and undermines the very foundation of cricket, which is a fair contest between bowler and batsman given identical conditions for both. Indeed, I will go so far as to say it is immoral. Admittedly, it requires an extraordinary level of skill to switch hands in such a short while and still hit the ball for six, but then extraordinary skill doesn’t make things lawful. We would have to legalise pickpocketing otherwise.