No, not like that.
And now it looks like VVS Laxman didn’t use vaseline on his bat.
But, why wouldn’t he?
If the players have known now for a few years that hotspot can be tricked with vaseline, special stickers and with random fluids, you’d think they are exploiting it.
It’s not against the laws of cricket or any ICC playing conditions that I can find.
It’s just using whatever advantage you can to stay out there, which is your job.
I mean this didn’t just happen, there have been whispers for years that you can trick hotspot. And these are the same batsmen who pretend that they aren’t out by shuffling their pads outside the line and not walking, if it’s as simple as vaseline on the edges before going out to bat, why not. Vaseline is not that hard to find, in most hotels if you ring down for it the concierge sends it up no questions asked.
If I was an international batsman and someone told me that it was within the laws and regulations to use cat vomit up the side of my bat, even if it only gave me a 0.001% chance of not being given out, I’d pay some crazy cat lady to follow me on tour and then every morning I would squeeze fresh vomit from a cat.
I might even do it if it was against the laws, but I figure the cat sick might be easy to smell and would stain the bat.
One thing I wouldn’t do is miss any chance I could to make myself more runs.
We spend so much time in cricket complaining about things we find morally wrong even if they don’t break any laws, VVS isn’t the first batsman that may have edged behind only for hotspot not too work.
Hotspot doesn’t even always need to be cheated, sometimes it doesn’t work because of angles, and sometimes it just doesn’t work. It’s a TV gimmick, not an infallible detection method. And sometimes that noise isn’t the bat on ball.
That said, if we could bring in a playing condition to ban vaseline from the edges of bats, it would be cool to see umpires sniffing the bat of the new batsman as he comes out.
