The Letter and The Spirit
In July 2023, at Lord’s, Jonny Bairstow ducked a bouncer, tapped his crease with his bat and wandered out for a chat with his partner, assuming the over was done. Alex Carey, behind the stumps, threw the ball and hit them. The third umpire gave Bairstow out. England was furious, Lord’s booed, two prime ministers weighed in, and the phrase “spirit of the game” got more airtime than it had in years.
What made the row so heated was that two things were true at once. Under the Laws of Cricket, Bairstow was out: the ball wasn’t dead, and he’d left his ground. And to a lot of people, it still felt wrong.
Cricket is unusual in having a name for that feeling. The Laws open with a preamble on the Spirit of Cricket, which says, in essence, that the game should be played not only within its Laws but within its spirit too, and that responsibility for this lies mainly with the captains. The umpires apply the Laws. The captains carry the spirit. On that day at Lord’s, the umpires did their job, and the decision about the spirit belonged to Pat Cummins, who could have withdrawn the appeal and didn’t.
You can argue about whether he should have. Plenty of people still do, mostly along national lines. What I find more interesting is the language itself, because cricket has stumbled on a problem that every organisation has, and very few admit.
The distinction between the letter and the spirit is ancient. It goes back at least to St Paul, who wrote that “the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life”. The letter is what’s written down. The spirit is what the writing was meant to achieve. Most of the time they point the same way. The interesting moments, in sport and in business, are when they don’t.
Organisations are full of these moments. There’s the policy that says expenses must be approved in advance, and the manager who misses a flight because of it. There’s the values statement that says “we put customers first”, and the returns policy that says the opposite in eight-point type. There’s the performance framework that rewards hitting targets, and the team that hits them in ways nobody intended.
When the letter and the spirit collide, people tend to reach for whichever one supports what they wanted to do anyway. If the rule helps them, it’s “just following policy”. If the rule gets in the way, it’s “not in the spirit of what we’re trying to do”. Both phrases sound principled. Neither tells you who was actually entitled to make the call.
That’s the part cricket got right, even if the Bairstow row didn’t feel like it. The Laws are clear about who does what. Umpires rule on the Laws; captains answer for the spirit. You can disagree with a captain’s decision, but at least you know whose decision it was.
Most organisations never say. They write the rules, publish the values, and leave the gap between them to whoever happens to be standing nearest when something goes wrong. Then they’re surprised when one person applies the rule rigidly and another ignores it entirely, and both insist they were doing the right thing.
So if your organisation talks about values, it’s worth asking a slightly unglamorous question: when a rule and a value disagree, who decides? If the answer is “it depends” or “we’d use common sense”, you haven’t got a spirit of the game. You’ve got a future argument, waiting for its moment at Lord’s.
