Leg Byes Reward Nobody — It Is Time to Take Them Out of Cricket

Here is a question worth turning over, as it has been turned over for the better part of three decades without yielding a single satisfying answer: why does a batsman’s team collect runs for a ball that strikes the pad?

Examine what a leg bye actually is. The bowler delivers a good ball. The batsman either misjudges it or cannot lay bat on it, and it thuds into pad or thigh — a moment of pure failure, dressed up after the fact as enterprise. The ball deflects away, the batsmen scamper, and the scoreboard ticks: credited not to the batsman, who failed to hit it, and certainly not to the bowler, who beat him, but to a phantom column called “extras,” cricket’s witness-protection programme for runs nobody will own up to scoring. Nobody on the field did anything skilful, and yet the batting side is paid for it.

That is close to indefensible. Almost every run in cricket is the issue of skill: a boundary is a stroke timed to perfection, a quick single sharp running and shrewd judgement. Even a wide or a no-ball, which also feed the extras column, are at least penalties for a genuine error by the bowler — there is a logic to them, a debt honestly settled. The leg bye obeys no such logic. It rewards the absence of skill, pressing runs into the hands of the side that has just failed, and then asking it to look grateful.

The position here is unambiguous: leg byes should be abolished. If the ball comes off pad or body rather than bat, no runs are scored, whether or not the batsmen choose to run. The delivery counts as a dot ball — as, morally, it always should have — because the batsman did not score off it.

Consider what this would do to the contest. As matters stand, against good seam or against spin on a turning maidana, a batsman can survive a whole awkward over by thrusting the front pad down the line, wearing the ball on the body, and pilfering the odd leg bye for his trouble — rewarded, in effect, for declining to play a stroke. I came up in the 1980s and 90s, when front-pad defence was practically taught as a craft, and one or two of my contemporaries built long and prosperous careers on a method best described as getting hit and looking pleased about it. Remove leg byes and that escape hatch is sealed. The batsman must use his bat, must commit to a shot and confront the bowler properly, and the bowler who beats him no longer quietly haemorrhages runs off the pad. His good ball stays a good ball on the card, where it belongs.

The other side deserves a hearing — no temper, however short, should deny it. Some hold that leg byes are what discourage batsmen from simply padding everything away with no intent, the prospect of a leg bye keeping them playing strokes rather than kicking the ball clear like a bored full-back. There is something in that, and any change would have to be weighed alongside the lbw law and the whole question of pad-play. But it is far better to solve the pad-play problem head-on than to keep paying out runs for failure as a clumsy workaround.

There is a plainer point, too, and it is the one that nags most. Leg byes inflate totals in a way that quietly distorts the game. A side that limps to 150 with twenty of those scraped off pads and thighs has not, in any meaningful sense, made 150 with the bat; it has made 130 and found the other twenty down the back of the sofa. Judge batsmen and bowlers against those totals — in selection rooms, in auctions, in fond and unreliable memories — and they are being measured against a number that includes runs no one earned.

Cricket is at its finest when the scoreboard is an honest ledger of skill: bat against ball, the better performer duly rewarded. The leg bye is one of the few places where that ledger tells a small, polite lie, rewarding the beaten batsman and fining the bowler who beat him. Take it out. Make the bat do the work. Let the dot ball off the pad be exactly what it is — a small, quiet triumph for the bowler, recorded at long last as such.