Postman Pat
Well-known member
Ok, next question:
Again this is a true story - probably about 15 years ago now - I was the skipper of the fielding side and we had a decent leggie bowling for us - we were playing at Slindon nr Arundel.
We'd just taken a wicket and a new batter comes to the crease - he was not the most gifted of strokemakers but his technique was to charge down the wicket to everything, but he was canny and made sure NOTHING got past him. So as the leggie ran up to bowl, this chap charged down the track, so the bowler aborted his delivery [didn't release the ball]. This happened 3 or 4 times in a row and it was clear neither batter nor bowler were going to change what they were doing.
As umpire, what should you do?
This happened to us too, we were playing Slindon (I think!), our young leggie was given the charge a few times, but as above the batsman made sure he got something on the ball every time, and was too far down to be given out LBW.
The leggie kept aborting the delivery until the umpire threatened to no-ball him. A few more experienced and qualified players on our side said that he couldn't be no-balled as he hadn't actually let go of the ball.
Our bowler finished the over and was then taken out of the attack until the batsman was dismissed.
We did discuss a signal to our keeper that the bowler would deliberately bowl really wide and get him stumped, but the keeper isn't allowed to move until after the ball has been released I believe.