Fielding in cricket is the action of fielders in collecting the ball after it is struck by the batsman. The captain of the fielding team must decide which fielding positions to use, and which to leave vacant. Fake fielding is when a fielder makes movements of some of his body parts as if he were fielding only to confuse batsmen into making mistakes. It is now a punishable offence under the ICC rules.
About Fielding (cricket) in brief
Fielding in cricket is the action of fielders in collecting the ball after it is struck by the batsman. Fielding generally involves preventing the ball from going to or over the edge of the field and getting the ball to either wicket as quickly as possible. There are a number of recognised fielding positions, and they can be categorised into the offside and leg side. The captain of the fielding team must decide which fielding positions to use, and which to leave vacant. Fake fielding is when a fielder makes movements of some of his body parts as if he were fielding only to confuse batsmen into making mistakes. It is now a punishable offence under the ICC rules. Some fielding positions are used offensively, that is, players are put there with the main aim being to catch out the batsmen rather than to stop or slow down the scoring of runs. These positions include Slip, Fly slip, Leg slip; Leg gully; the short and silly positions. Short leg, also known as bat pad, is a position specifically intended to catch balls that unintentionally strike the bat and leg pad, and thus end up only a metre or two to the leg side, but somewhat closer to the pitch. If any of these rules is violated, an umpire will call the delivery a no-ball. For close fielders, anything other than adjustments to stance in relation to the striker is significant. In the outfield, fielders usually do not move towards the striker or away from the striker, they usually do slight movement off the line.
With only nine fielders, there are not enough to cover every part of the pitch simultaneously. The main tactical decision for the fielding captain is to strike a balance between setting an attacking field and a defensive field. An attacking field is one in which they are likely to take catches and get the ball in a way that they are most likely to get to get the catch and thus get the wicket. A fielding position is neither fixed nor precisely defined, and fielders can be placed in positions that differ from the basic positions. The nomenclature of the positions is somewhat esoteric, but roughly follows a system of polar coordinates – one word specifies the angle from the batswoman, and is sometimes preceded by an adjective describing the distance from thebatsman. If a fielder wilfully fields it otherwise, the ball becomes dead and five penalty runs are awarded to the batting side, unless the ball previously struck a batsman not attempting to hit or avoid the ball. The area to the left of a right-handed batsman is called the legside or on side, while that to the right is the off side. If the bats man is left-handed, the leg and off sides are reversed and the fielding positions are a mirror image of those shown. The captain may move players between fielding positions at any time except when a bowler is in the act of bowling to a batsmen, though there are exceptions for fielders moving in anticipation of the ball being hit.
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This page is based on the article Fielding (cricket) published in Wikipedia (as of Nov. 03, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
