Steve Smith’s eye-blacks and the slippery slope of cricket’s tool rules

On November 30, Australian cricketer Steven Smith was spotted wearing eye-black strips while training for the forthcoming pink-ball Ashes Test match in Brisbane. These strips are pasted over the cheekbone and reduce the glare created by light reflected off the skin by more than half. They were popularised in the previous decade by West Indies cricketer Shivnarine Chanderpaul. It’s a simple solution to a problem posed by the pink ball, which has a black seam that ‘extra’ light could make difficult to pick under floodlights.

The strips are also a reminder that modern sport is full of unobtrusive technologies that help athletes cope with difficult environments without turning them into different kinds of athletes. These tools are often aimed at restoring something that environmental conditions take away, including clear vision under bright lights, stable joints under heavy load or basic safety in high-speed collisions – but some of them also sit in a grey area between ordinary equipment and performance enhancement, raising questions about where sport should draw the line.

Restorative logic

In American football and baseball, eye-blacks and tinted helmet visors help players keep track of the ball under floodlights while also protecting their eyes. Basketball and football players use compression sleeves and kinesiology tape to support muscles and joints when they have a packed match schedule. Long-distance runners and footballers wear custom orthotic insoles to correct gait and reduce contact forces, seemingly without changing what their legs can do in principle. Swimmers bank on specialised goggles to see clearly and maintain direction in turbulent water. Tennis players have long moved away from wooden and towards composite racquets that are standardised but still vary in subtle ways that can enhance control or mitigate strain.

In each case, sport has accepted equipment that offsets some nuisance while usually resisting technologies that would add new capacities. Cricket has its own bevy of such ‘prosthetic’ aids. Aside from anti-glare strips, they include prescription contact lenses or goggles to correct vision, polarised or tinted sunglasses for fielders and wicketkeepers; batting helmets with redesigned grilles and visors; batting gloves with extra padding and consistent grip; arm, thigh, chest, and rib guards; custom orthotic insoles in cricket shoes for better gait; knee, elbow and ankle braces or supports; compression sleeves, socks, and base layers for circulation and recovery; and dental mouthguards to protect the teeth and reduce concussion risk.

Most of these technologies are uncontroversial because they fit a restorative logic, meaning they protect the body in a high-risk environment or restore ordinary human capacities in conditions that would otherwise degrade them. Eye-blacks and sunglasses reduce glare so a batter can track the ball as a person with normal vision would under less intense lighting. Contact lenses or sports goggles allow a short-sighted player to approximate the sight of a player with no refractive error. Helmets and guards reduce injury risk from forces that are intrinsic to contemporary cricket. Insoles and compression garments help players keep joints and muscles functioning within normal ranges over long playing seasons.

A fine line

The main regulatory and ethical questions arise where the line between restoring and enhancing becomes less clear. For example, polarised sunglasses and tinted contact lenses do more than simply restore vision that myopia has taken away. In some lighting conditions they can improve contrast, reduce background noise, and make it easier to pick the ball’s seam or shape than with the naked eye. That’s still a modest advantage compared to non-users but it’s also an advantage tied to access to equipment and to knowledge about how to tune lenses to specific conditions, such as pink-ball cricket played under lights.

If such tuning becomes very precise, regulators could be pushed to decide whether certain tints or coatings remain allowable as ‘normal’ protective eyewear or if they cross into a category of performance aids that need to be standardised or even restricted.

A similar issue exists with braces, insoles, and compression gear. At present they’re justified as tools to prevent injuries and manage physical loads. However, a brace that stores and releases elastic energy in a joint or a compression garment that measurably improves sprint or endurance performance in real-time, rather than just aiding recovery, would be tantamount to mechanical doping. Cricket doesn’t yet have the kind of detailed equipment regulations that cycling or track and field sports have developed around such questions but the direction of sports science suggests these issues may not always remain hypothetical.

High stakes

Cost and access add an ethical layer even when the technology itself is considered okay. Custom orthotics and high-end contact lenses are more accessible to players in well-resourced systems than to those in poorer domestic structures. If such equipment meaningfully reduces injury risk or marginally improves performance, there’s a question of distributive fairness in competitions that mix players from very different backgrounds. Recall that these competitions are also becoming more competitive and more lucrative.

Thus far, cricket’s solution has largely been informal: governing bodies specify minimum safety standards for items like helmets and gloves and then leave the finer technological differences to the market. That may be adequate when the performance effects remain small, but there’s still the question of whether marginal gains could build up into systematic advantages.

Eye-blacks have very low stakes in this spectrum of technologies. It’s also cheap and easy to use and its effect is to help batters cope with glare partly introduced by a shift in the sport driven by commercial interests and the importance of broadcast revenue. The ethical concern here is minimal and any competitive effect can be offset by universal availability. The more challenging cases lie however in  more subtle advances in materials science and sports engineering that can be built into gear that looks otherwise familiar, changing what it does without obviously changing what it is. That’s where cricket administrators may eventually need better criteria for differentiating harmless prosthetic support from technologies that enhance performance.