Sparsh Telang

1. Did you know that if the umpires rule a pitch as dangerous and unfixable, play can only continue on a new pitch after getting consent from both captains. A captain whose side is facing defeat can withhold their consent at no cost, meaning no further play is possible, the match concludes and the result is a Draw. 2. Oh also, the helmets worn by umpires are not considered as clothing so the rule that "a ball that lodges in an umpire's clothing is dead" doesn't actually consider the helmets or any other protective gear that they might be wearing.....yet. 3. IIf that didn't amuse you, the weight limits for the new Size 3 ball might. The maximum is given as "4.84 ounces/140 g", but 4.84 oz is 137.2 g (and 140 g is 4.94 oz). So a 139 g ball is legal in grams but illegal in ounces (Image 1). 4. Another goofy one I saw is that if a fielder obstructs a running batter (+5 runs) by screaming an obscene insult (+5 runs), it leads to a total penalty of 10 runs. However, if you directly choose to shoulder-charge the running player (which is arguably the "worse" offence), the obstruction penalty is actually dropped and the misconduct code only gives away 5 penalty runs. 5. Lastly, on the English Laws site, the diagram that defines "off side" and "on side" (in Appendix A.13), which LBW depends on, has its only caption in Sinhala for some reason (Image 2). These are few of the many (small) gaps that I found in the @MCCOfficial laws of cricket. As a hackathon judge in college over a year ago, I saw a project which used policy-as-code and formal verification to find out any contradictions in the college policy documents. Since then, doing something similar at a larger scale has always been at the back of my mind. Some gaps like these were already closed in this year's update, like restricting "bunny hop" catches, or requiring the last over of a day's play to be completed even if a wicket falls. Still, it was a lot of fun going through all these mismatches and just reading the laws of the game. There are around 30 other quirky instances like these in the 2026 Laws. Most of them will never affect a game, or even come up. But it would still be better to fix these gaps so we don't have to wait for a day like the 2019 World Cup final (@benstokes38), @Angelo69Mathews getting timed out or @jbairstow21 walking too far out to find out there was something in the rules that wasn't fully considered.