Actively confusing

Cricket is a simple game. So, too, is football. Yet neither sport can resist tinkering with its rules.

In cricket, most of the rule-tinkering has been for the good. Anybody with half a brain, or less, can understand why a batsman should not be given out LBW to a ball pitching outside leg stump. Can’t they? Yet everybody makes a fuss about how complicated cricket is, producing tea-towels printed with supposedly humorous renderings of the laws of the game. In our house, all the tea-towels have pictures of New Zealand, or different varieties of acorn, on them.

In football, it is the offside rule which is supposed to be complicated. It isn’t. Yet the authorities saw fit to meddle with it in 1995, introducing some nonsense about players being non-active. As Danny Blanchflower didn’t say, “If you are not active, you have no business being on the pitch”.

The rule is nevertheless still very easy to understand. So why has the Royal Mint just produced a new 50-pence coin (to commemorate the 2012 Olympic Games in London) which carries on its flip-side a pictorial explanation of the offside rule? (No answer required).

This was supposedly done because so many people – mostly women - are confused by the offside rule. This is an insult to women. It is also disingenuous. The people who don’t understand the offside rule are, more or less, the same people who don’t understand the LBW rule, and for the same reason. They do not care enough about cricket or football to take it in. I myself have never bothered to try and understand the rules about gross tonnage, for example.

Just to put the tin lid on it, the offside law described on the new 50p coin is wrong. This will help perpetuate the myth that women cannot understand the offside law. Why doesn’t somebody mint a coin which helps us to understand something useful, such as women?

chris@merlinco.com

Making contact

It comes as no surprise to hear that the Admiralty Court in London recently apportioned liability on a 60/40 basis in a claim for damages arising from a collision between a VLCC and a containership. Nobody is ever 100 per cent to blame for anything in the Admiralty Court – it is just a question of how the pie is sliced.

Despite – or perhaps because of - advances in technology, the number of collisions seems to be increasing. There are all sorts of reasons why this may be so, ranging from over-reliance on technology, to the crew watching televised football matches on board ship.

As somebody once said, football is not a contact sport, it’s a collision sport. Dancing is a contact sport.

Women in high places

My very first editor gave me a sound piece of advice when I started out. “Always write about what you know,” he told me.

Despite this, I am moved to write once again on the subject of women. Although the new head of IMO is now confirmed to be a man (I don’t mean to imply that there was any doubt about his gender), the good news is that a woman has, for the first time, been appointed head of the IMF.

She is charged with putting in place a more open and transparent procedure. We should expect great things, because women are much better than men at openness and transparency. As the new IMF boss herself says, “Leman Brothers would never have collapsed if it had been Leman Sisters”. She also has to restore the credibility of the IMF following the resignation of her predecessor – a man. Good luck with that.

The only other candidate for the IMF job – a man – said in the run-up to the election that he was like a football team starting a match five goals down. The result was a foregone conclusion. Women are better than men at most things, including - in England, at least - football.

It was interesting to see that the manager of North Korea’s women’s football team claimed that the side lost a World Cup match to the United States this week because several of the players were struck by lightning a month ago.

The manager of the North Korea football team is a man. Men are better at making excuses than women.

chris@merlinco.com