Many of my loyal readers will not follow cricket. Nor do I, tuning into it fleetingly every few years when England manage to do something better than hopeless.

But now, armed with Sky HD TV, a fiery England side and nothing else to do, I am enthralled by this England v India Test series. (For non-cricket fan readers esp in the USA, a Test match is the ‘top’ level of cricket with matches lasting five days, often ending in a draw. Don’t ask.)

My curiosity has been enhanced by the presence for a few post A-Level weeks of Crawf Minor in southern India. He returned today to relate vivid accounts of impertinent anti-English India TV ads which mysteriously declined after England won the first Test so strongly.

Anyway, today something happened which had never been seen before on a serious cricket pitch. It prompts some wider reflections on the role of rules and ethics in society.

On the final play before the afternoon tea-break, one English batsman hit the ball powerfully towards the boundary. An Indian fielder dived to stop it, but in doing so tumbled over the boundary line and evidently thought that the ball had hit the rope, therefore giving the batsman four runs automatically and ending the playing session. In fact the ball did not hit the rope, staying just in play.

The fielder in a couple of seconds worked out where the ball was, then desultorily tossed it back to the centre, where another Indian fielder used it to take off the bails as if to signify that English batsman Bell was out of his crease and so dismissed (‘out’) from future scoring. (Sorry, Americans and other non-cricket fans, if these terms mean nothing to you.)

While all this was going on, the two English batsman evidently thought that the ball had gone for a ‘four’ and starting walking off the pitch for the tea-break. As did some of the Indian fielders. It then emerged that the ball had stayed in play, and according to the rules Bell had made a mistake by walking away. The Indians asked the umpires for a ruling by making a formal ‘appeal’ that he was in fact out. To which the umpires after consulting TV evidence said: out.

Sensation.

This was something like a goal-keeper at soccer being given the impression by most other players that the ball is out of play and the game over, then walking off the field with other players from both sides. It turns out that the ball is in play and the game not over – the other side shoot it into an empty net. All that is within the rules and usual football norms ("always play to the whistle") but what about the spirit of the game? If any.

Anyway, the tea-break ended with the Indian side and umpires returning to the field to deafening boos from the crowd. But then … new sensation. Bell reappeared. The English side had asked the Indian side politely to reconsider their appeal, and the Indian captain after consulting his team had agreed to withdraw it.

The amazing thing here was that at this point of the match, Bell was crushing the Indian bowling and had turned the whole match strongly in England’s favour. So to allow him to continue when the Indians could easily have said that he made a silly mistake and should pay for it was generosity of a really high order.

The point was, I think, that the Indian side themselves (including most importantly the fielder who stopped the ball just short of the boundary) had thought that the ball had gone out of play, ending the session. So if they were confused/unclear it did not seem fair to them to take advantage of their opponent’s confusion.

A wonderful and touching moment.

So much of what we do in wider life is bounded by rules, and so by those whose job it is to interpret them. Most of us like to think that we respect the rules and expect them to be enforced against others who don’t do so. 

British ‘adversarial’ legal and political cultures also play to this – part of the cleverness of the game indeed lies in using the rules to bring down the other side which for one reason or the other has not quite followed the agreed procedure. See also eg parking wardens, political correctness commissars and the multitude of other petty officials who claim to perform a useful function for society by enforcing the relevant rules ‘properly’ and therefore fairly.

Because, of course, these annoying people arrive in our lives armed with the fact that there is a generalised fairness in having rules and expecting them to be upheld pretty strictly.

That’s the whole point of rules. If most rules aren’t properly enforced or are somehow always ‘negotiable’, what is the incentive for anyone to learn or obey rules at all? The very fact of rules being upheld often defends the less advantaged against the more advantaged (see eg private victims of media telephone ‘hacking’ getting sizeable compensation awards).

In fact it could be said that the impartiality and iron ‘objectivity’ of rules, where the rules are agreed by a democratic process and generally accepted by everyone, is what distinguishes civilisation itself from everything else. From Magna Carta onwards. 

Yet that sort of instrumental mechanical fairness is not quite enough. Sometimes things happen which are squarely within the rules yet are not quite ‘right’ according to a higher sense of fair play.

Here the Indian team as a whole did not want to take advantage of a messy situation which they themselves had not understood at the time, and whose messiness they themselves had helped create .

English law has an echo of this sort of idea in the idea of ‘detrimental reliance’: where X has acted reasonably on the basis of assurances given by Y and thereby incurred damage, Y can not wriggle out of his own words even if otherwise they might have no legal force.

See also the Eggshell skull rule. The deep and deeply just general idea in both cases is that on the margins the law acts to discourage people taking unfair advantage of ambiguous situations which they have brought about.

As far as I can see, cricket (unlike say soccer) does not give the umpires the overarching authority to impose such an outcome based on an instinct of core fairness – the two sides’ captains are given a prime responsibility of upholding the laws and spirit of the game.

So today the English captain was within the spirit of the rules to ask the Indian captain to withdraw his appeal. The Indian captain could have politely declined to do so, but instead allowed Bell back into the match even though it looked to be heavily to India’s disadvantage to do so.

In fact not long after the tea-break Bell was dismissed in the normal way, so the immediate cost to India was not that high. But other England batsmen went on to pile up an intimidating lead; England now look set to win the second Test with some ease.

In short, classy Indian batsman Rahul Dravid captured something important for us all when after the day’s play closed he said that the Indian team had walked off for the tea break thinking that something was ‘not quite right’ about Bell’s strange dismissal. They then acted accordingly.

The Americans (and eg Russians, Australians and many other species who invariably play hard and long to win) have a blunt expression: ‘a good loser is a loser’ (ie it’s a fatal expression of inherent weakness not to do everything needed to win at almost any cost).

Against that Team India showed us today a quite different attitude, echoing the immortal line from Pinocchio: always let your conscience be your guide…