Marking The Field

In junior cricket matches are often played on multi-purpose fields in school grounds and parks.  Without use of the dedicated fields that senior grades play on, the juniors are left to mark their fields before start of play - a responsibility of the home team.

In an earlier post I discussed how to determine the size of the field and touched on how to mark the field.  In this post I am going to expand on that field marking.

The field is typically marked with cones instead of a rope, paint or chalk line, or a fence, and this means that the curved portions are not curves but a series of angled lines - often fairly coarse due to the low number of suitable markers available.

Note: umpires should adjudge boundaries based on a straight line between the boundary markers if those markers are not continuous (refer to Laws of Cricket: Law 19 (Boundaries), and players should be advised of this to reduce confusion, dissent, disappointment and inaccurate claims of catches (refer to Laws of Cricket: Law 32 (Caught)).

Field markings with cones - left side has an odd number, right an even number

Boundary markers should be placed on each side and parallel to the pitch, one cone opposite to each wicket and one mid-way between the length of the pitch - that's the first six cones.  Ensure that the cones form a line with the wickets.  the remaining cones are spaced evenly about the arcs of the field - the arcs which are circumscribed (defined) by the rope fixed on one end to where middle stump goes, and marked on the other end with the desired boundary distance.  Walk the arc placing the cones at the desired distance.

Note: Why lines and not the arc?  It is mentally quicker and more accurate to draw a line between two points and determine on which side of that line a third point falls on than to infer the shape of a section of arc from two points as that requires a much larger amount of the arc to be taken in to give the shape of the section before focus then reverts to the smaller section and the third point in question - a decision made this way is unlikely to be very accurate.

I'm going to give you two ways of determining the spacing between the cones - one takes a bit more maths, but if you're quick with the maths it will be quicker than the other method.  Either way you chose, it does not need to be exact.  Of course, the third method is to just get on with it.

Method 1 (more maths)
The two arcs on the ends of the field form a circle, and we're going to use that fact and a little rounding to give us something that's close enough to get on with the work at hand.

Where P is the number of paces between cones, B is the boundary distance, C is the number of cones available, and S is your average step in meters.

Example

With some realistic numbers thrown in to our example above we can see that we should have about ten paces between the cones.

Method 2 (more measuring)
Walk the arc on one side of the field, counting the number of steps.  Divide that number by half the number of cones (minus two).  That should give you the number of steps between cones.

Why bother?
For anyone that has made it this far, you would be doing well to question my sanity ... and I'm not going to claim that I am.  But still, why bother with this, why make it so hard?

Maybe I have a mild form of OCD, I cannot set the field in under thirty minutes by eye.  I agonise over the spacing and placement of the cones.  I check and adjust, compare alignment, observe the shape, fiddle and in general obsess over it.

But it's also about creating a good ground for the players.  We often like to think that they don't really care about it, that they don't notice or that it doesn't make any difference.  It does, though.  It matters to the players that someone is willing to invest the time and care into their experience, and they respect that - and they respect the boundary.  And it matters to the umpires.