The rule was brought in by the International Cricket Council during the Covid-19 pandemic for health reasons
Mumbai: You can spit and shine once again, at least in the Indian Premier League. At the captains’ meeting ahead of IPL 2025 at the BCCI headquarters here on Thursday, all ten agreed that the ban on the use of saliva to shine the ball can be lifted to offset some of the bat-ball imbalance caused by the Impact Player rule that has seen par scores substantially go up.
India pacer Mohammed Shami, seen after the Champions Trophy win on March 9, was the first to seek a repeal of the ban on using saliva to shine the ball. (ICC- X)
Another new move agreed is allowing the use of a second new ball mid-way through the second innings of a match to minimise the impact of dew.
The saliva ban was introduced in May 2020 during the Covid pandemic. In September 2022, the ban was considered ‘appropriate’ and made permanent. While the view at the time was that the age-old practice of using saliva was unhygienic and bowlers had become accustomed to living without it, there has been an afterthink.
At the recent Champions Trophy, India pacer Mohammed Shami made a pitch to allow saliva use again to shine the ball. “We are trying (reverse swing), but they don’t allow the use of saliva. We keep appealing that it should be allowed so that we can bring reverse swing back into the game and it becomes interesting,” he said.
Fast bowlers use saliva to shine one side of the leather ball, leaving the other side rough. When the ball gets older and begins to reverse, it swings in the direction of the shiny side, making it challenging for the batter.
In the absence of saliva, bowlers were using sweat to shine the ball, but it was clearly not enough. Some cricketers sweat more than the others. In certain weather conditions, players do not sweat. With the Impact player rule allowing the batters to attack more thanks to deeper batting line-ups, a need to empower the bowlers was felt necessary.
Although the saliva use ban has been revoked only in IPL, the issue is expected to be taken up soon by the ICC Cricket Committee to relax the rule in international cricket. More than T20 cricket, reverse swing is a factor in ODIs and Test cricket as the ball gets older than 20-25 overs. With two new balls used in ODIs, bowlers have been complaining about the lost art of reverse swing.
The move to allow a second new ball to be used in the second innings of an IPL match will become relevant only for evening matches. The feedback, it is learnt, has been that in matches where dew took effect, the toss became a determining factor as teams were disadvantaged bowling second as the ball got wet.
