However, it will be difficult to metircate the lenght of a cricket pitch - it has been one chain since the first time that the laws were codified (sometime in the eighteenth century).
Dear Martin,
To change the game of cricket to a 20 metre pitch is much less significant than the change necessary for football in the USA. You only need to go from the current 20.117 metres to a rounded 20 millimetres — a reduction of only 117 millimetres or a little more than the width of your fist.
Most grounds keepers in Australia don't own old pre-metric tapes any more, so almost all cricket grounds are now marked out as 20.117 metres. I recall at the end of the last cricket season a news report about a cricket pitch in Melbourne that had been improperly laid out. It was 22 metre long. Nobody had noticed that for the whole of the cricket season the cricket pitch was about 2 metres longer than usual.
By the way, if the safety of batsmen is a concern when facing fast bowlers (such as Brett Lee) the a simple change to the bowling rule so that the bowler's toe is behind the popping crease would neatly compensate for the slight reduction to a 20 metre pitch length.
Cheers,
Pat Naughtin
PO Box 305, Belmont, Geelong, Australia
Phone 61 3 5241 2008
Pat Naughtin is the editor of the free online monthly newsletter, 'Metrication matters'.
You can subscribe by going to http://www.metricationmatters.com/newsletter
Pat is the editor of the 'Numbers and measurement' chapter of the Australian Government Publishing Service 'Style manual – for writers, editors and printers'. He is a Member of the National Speakers Association of Australia and the International Federation of Professional Speakers. He is also recognised as a Lifetime Certified Advanced Metrication Specialist (LCAMS) with the United States Metric Association. For more information go to: http://metricationmatters.com
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