Essex County Cricket Club blasted the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) for deducting 12 County Championship points as one of their players used a bat ruled too wide.
Essex’s hopes of winning the County Championship have all but perished when one of their batters, Feroze Khushi, used a bat, whose dimension went against the MCC’s regulations, with Law 5.7.2 imposing that a bat’s width should be 10.8cm.
The issue arose in the second innings of Essex’s opening County Championship fixture against Nottinghamshire when on-field umpires Tom Lungley and Steve O’Shaughnessy, during a routine inspection, found out that Khushi’s bat got stuck in the measurement gauge.
Essex went on to win their campaign opener convincingly by 254 runs but has now been docked 12 points from the 20 that they secured from the victory.
The sanction means that Essex now trail defending champions and leaders Surrey by 56 points with just two rounds remaining.
The sanction was imposed by the Cricket Discipline Commission (CDC), which runs as a separate entity, independent of the ECB.
But that did not prohibit former England captain and Essex Keith Fletcher from branding the ECB as “absolutely stupid”.
“Feroze does not believe he did anything wrong and the whole side has been penalised, not just the one player,” Fletcher told The Times.
“As a batsman I know that a few millimetres either way is not going to have any effect on performance. Umpires test bats at random and I think the ECB have been absolutely stupid.”
Notably, Essex lodged a formal appeal when the charge was raised by the CDC and in a 31-page judgment, the body acknowledged that some of the gauges used to measure Khushi’s bat “did not comply precisely with the specifications”.
Meanwhile, Feroze Khushi, in response to the sanction, said that he had trusted his bat manufacturing company to follow MCC’s regulations, adding he did not intend to use a “non-conforming bat” but was still reprimanded for his part in the negligence.
“Essex CCC regrets the outcome and, although disappointed with the appeal decision and subsequent sanctions, accepts the charges of the CDC panel,” a club statement said.
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