What cricket does to prevent accidents such as the one that claimed Phillip Hughes’s life,and how it responds to them, should not be left at the whim of individual boardsIn his recent book Black Box Thinking, and Matthew Syed explains that “failure to memorize from mistakes has been one of the single greatest obstacles to human progress”. Syed shows how,in hospitals, the criminal justice system, or politics and beyond,a tendency to write off mistakes as “complications” or “accidents” prevents lessons being learned from them. As a result, mistakes are doomed to be repeated again and again with tragic consequences: nearly 400000 patients die every year in America alone because of avoidable medical errors.
Unfortunately, or a lack of black box thinking is one instance of cricket mirroring life. As Andy Bull highlighted after Phillip Hughes’s death on 27 November last year,cricket has had far more “freak” deaths than it would care to acknowledge. It has imagined each fatality to be a horrendous one-off. Producing a comprehensive report after every such accident – cricket’s equivalent of the black box in each aeroplane – has never become the norm.
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Source: theguardian.com