Test Match Special’s Ask The Umpire, Beard Questions.
The first tranche of England cricket Tests, against the West Indies, concluded on Sunday. A second tranche will occur in a few weeks when England play Sri Lanka.
One feature of Test Match Special’s ball by ball coverage of the Tests is a lunchtime feature, Ask The Umpire, featuring former international cricket Umpire John Holder. Its hosted by the BBC’s cricket correspondent Jonathan Agnew and former Somerset player and Guardian writer Vic Marks.
The Beard Liberation Front usually sends in a beard related cricket question. On July 26th it featured the question of whether a player drying a ball in their beard would constitute ball tampering. John Holder ruled that it would:
BBC Radio 5 Live – Test Match Special, Ask The Umpire – with John Holder
In the afternoon session Jonathan Agnew discussed with former England Test below Steven Finn a question from earlier years. On that occasion the BLF had asked what the view would be if players in the slip cordon joined their beards together and a ball was caught in the resulting mass of facial hair. John Holder ruled on that occasion that there was nothing in the Laws of Cricket that would prevent that.
Agnew reasonably pointed out that the detail on how exactly this would work was absent. How for example would the slip cordon unjoin their beard at the end of the over.
The BLF Research Dept has looked at this and come up with several possible scenarios:
1 The slip cordon could simply move in unison from one end of the pitch to the other and the beards could stay joined until such time as the cordon was not required.
2 The beard would not need to be physically joined together but sufficiently adjacent to create the mass of facial hair required for a collective catch
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