Origins of the Wide Ball Law — From Daddy White to MCC, 1809-1811

Cricket's law on bowling had focused for half a century on questions of arm height and ball action; the question of where the ball was bowled had received little attention. Wide deliveries were tolerated as a tactical device, particularly in stake matches, where bowlers could simply deliver out of reach to avoid giving runs.

By the late 1800s wides had become a serious irritant in major matches. Beauclerk himself, a relentless competitor, used wides occasionally as a tactic. The 1810 single-wicket match in which Lambert beat Beauclerk by deliberately bowling wides — and the resulting public ridicule — made reform inevitable.

Throughout the eighteenth century the laws of cricket had said little about wide deliveries. There was no penalty against the bowler for delivering the ball out of reach of the batter; the runs that resulted (if any) counted as byes. The earliest pressure for change came not from the bowling end but from the batting end: in 1771 Thomas 'Daddy' White appeared at the crease for Hambledon against Surrey carrying a bat the width of the wicket, the better to defend himself. The Hambledon Club committee responded by limiting the bat width to four-and-a-quarter inches — the dimension still in force today — but the wide ball itself remained legal. Through the 1800s the practice of bowling deliberately wide became more common, particularly in single-wicket matches where there was no fielding side to take advantage of an over-the-line delivery. The 1810 single-wicket match between Lambert and Beauclerk-and-Howard, in which Lambert's deliberate bowling of wides was decisive, gave the practice its highest-profile demonstration. The MCC's 1809 revision of the Laws had already touched on the issue. The formal law against bowling wides — penalising the bowler with a run added to the batting side's total — was introduced in 1811. Initial implementation was awkward: wides were first added to byes rather than recorded separately, but by the 1820s they had become a distinct category in scoring.

“Wide deliveries were outlawed in 1811. The latter ruling followed an innings by a batter called Thomas 'Daddy' White, who appeared with a bat the width of the wicket.”

The 1811 wide ball law was extended in subsequent revisions to specify what constituted 'beyond the batter's reach', and to deal with the new category of wides that arose from roundarm and overarm bowling later in the century. The basic principle — that a wide costs the bowling side a run — has been continuous since 1811.