E P Thompson, Time Work Discipline & Stop Watches in limited overs cricket
The ICC which at least claims to govern world cricket has determined that in order to address limited overs cricket matches dragging on (which many do) for 4 months to April 2024 in Men’s limited over matches a stop watch rule will be used. If there are delays of more than 60 seconds between overs on more than three occasions in an innings the fielding side will incur a five run penalty.
It is a brave decision.
Time wasting (as well as unavoidable delays for a range of reasons) is to be found not just in cricket but a range of sports- football being a prime example. It can destroy the spectacle of a game but the bottom line issue is more likely to be that games that go on a bit annoy TV franchisers
Behind this lies an industrial obsession with time and the market capitalist idea that time is money.
The stop watch experiment brings workplace productivity checks to cricket
EP Thompson’s Time, Work Discipline which appeared in Past and Present in 1967, and remains a foundation text.
To give a brief flavour, he writes of ‘Smilesian snippets about humble men who by rising early and diligence, made good’. He continues that as workers secured reductions in working hours moralists became concerned that ‘manual workers after concluding their work were left with several hours in the day to be spent nearly as they please’.
Time is money even on the limited overs cricket fields and what exactly are the players doing with all that time they are supposedly and sometimes deliberately wasting..
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