Why is change so hard to enact in sport?

Laws or rules govern all sports. Some are seldom changed, others frequently revised. The simpler the game, the rarer any change is thought necessary. The more complicated it is, the more tinkering with the laws is thought, or found to be, necessary.

Compare football and rugby union. In many respects, football, at the top level anyway, is very different from the game I first watched more than 70 years ago. Pitches are better, even when not synthetic. Anyone watching clips of a George Best masterclass sixty years ago is likely to be amazed by the sight of the mud patches on which he displayed his wizardry.

Yet the laws of the game have scarcely changed. Even the still-controversial use of VAR is no more than an attempt to make the adjudication of the law relating to a penalty kick more consistent. Even when a law might be changed for the better — that relating to offside, for example — nothing is done. Football is a very conservative game, and it can afford to be so because it is a very simple one.

Compare this with Rugby Union. Here the game is so complicated, with so much that can go wrong, that frequent amendments to the laws are deemed necessary. Things that used to be legal are now outlawed.

Other things that used to be illegal, passing off the ground after being tackled, for instance, or lifting in the line-out, are now permitted. Few spectators and, let us be honest, few of us who write or broadcast about the game, understand the laws relating to what is lawful and what is unlawful in the set scrum.

Sometimes we suspect that the referee is likewise puzzled. Law changes are made seemingly without consideration of the great unwritten law — the unforeseeable or at least possible unforeseen consequences.

When long ago the law requiring the ball to be played with the foot after a tackle was repealed, the foot rush — forwards keeping the ball at their feet and operating in harmony — soon disappeared from the game; but I doubt if this was the intention of the lawmakers. A shame. The foot rush required skill and hours of practice to be effective; it is a long lost glory of the game.

Tennis (Lawn Tennis, as it was once called) is another very simple sport, so simple that it has required little in the way of change. Perhaps some is needed now. Players are bigger, stronger and faster, but they still play on a court the dimensions of which were fixed rather more than a hundred years ago.

This is one reason why 5-set matches now sometimes last for five hours; shots that would have been winners in the past are now retrieved and returned. Perhaps the court should be enlarged?

But perhaps everyone is happy with things such as getting the ball into the service box. It’s understandable of course that children and amateur players need this; without getting a second chance, so many games would consist only of double faults.

But professionals? Do the likes of Federer and Djokovic really need a second chance when they serve wide or long? Still, tennis is a simple game, made gripping, especially by its intelligently devised scoring system which ensures that there may be a succession of key moments and, remarkably, means that no match is irretrievably lost until the final point is played. Experiments with using the format employed in Table Tennis have demonstrated just how much duller this is.

If tennis is simple, cricket is devilishly complicated. Accordingly, its long history is one of repeated revision of the laws. Yet, astonishingly, it is still recognisable as the game which took its present form in the last quarter of the nineteenth century.

Moreover, almost all revisions of its laws have been intended to ensure that a fair balance between bat and ball is maintained. Nevertheless, the need for adaptation has repeatedly been recognised. Today, for instance, many are perturbed by what seems the excessive amount of fast short-pitched bowling directed at the batsman’s body or head rather than at the wicked.

There is more of it partly because there are many more very tall fast or fastish bowlers who can achieve sharp and threatening bounce without pitching the ball halfway down the wicket, indeed from not much short of what has conventionally been called a “good length”.

Certainly, more batsmen are hit on the head more often than used to be the case. Almost a hundred years ago, in the famous “bodyline” series of 1932-3, only two or three batsmen in these pre-helmet days were dangerously struck in the five Tests, far fewer than is quite normal in one day of Test cricket today.

What’s to be done about it. No one, happily, has suggested lengthening the pitch. However, the fact that the average height of fast bowlers has risen by six or eight inches or even more since Harold Larwood (5 feet 8 inches) bowled bodyline against Don Bradman, might seem to make the case for doing so.

However sensible, this would also be rather sad. The length of the pitch — 22 yards (not metres of course) links today to its eighteenth-century Hambledon days. Twenty-two yards: it’s a “chain” — an agricultural measure, a tenth of a furlong.

Sometimes, as a conservative knows, no matter how apparently persuasive the ground for change may be, it is right to say “no”.