David Leggat: Why on earth are they called sports?

Sport is full of complex questions. Why synchronised swimming? And doubles in squash?

And as the Winter Olympics are all over our screens right now, I reckon if we were meant to skate really fast on ice The Man Upstairs would have given us blades on our feet.

Luge? Skeleton? At least with the skeleton you can see death coming as you head butt your way off the walls at seriously fast km/h. With the luge, you're peering at it between your feet. But for goodness sake, why?

And I'm sorry, but curling? Bowls on ice without the bias. Why? And why do all those spectators look miserable in Turin? Wouldn't you be if you had to wrap up like explorer Ranulph Fiennes for hours on end?

But at least one of cricket's latest contributions to sports' Why? department has been red carded.

The super sub, that rule which turned an 11-a-side game into 12, is heading for the International Cricket Council's wastemaster. I'm all in favour of the odd bit of experimentation but this attempt to jazz up the one-day game was a dud.

Its biggest problem was that captains had to reveal their extra player before the toss, which then often made the choice redundant.

Witness Stephen Fleming at Napier against the Sri Lankans a few weeks ago. Jamie How was in the XI before the toss, but gone when the team trooped out behind the umpires 20 minutes later.

Strangely, the idea was the brainchild of the ICC's international committee, which comprises a group of prominent former test players, led by India's Sunil Gavaskar. Strange because you'd have thought if anyone could see the pitfalls in the idea it would be them. Evidently not.

So out it goes in a month or so to no one's regret.

But it's out with the old, in with the world championship of Twenty20, perhaps as early as September next year. In some ways the popularity of this 2 1/2-hour show mirrors the rise of the one-day game a few decades ago.

It's all very well getting pointy-headed and rubbishing it as Not The Real Thing. But the two internationals at Eden Park, against Australia a year ago and the West Indies on Thursday night have drawn bumper crowds. Talk about voting with your feet.

Just one word of warning. It's a golden goose for the bean counters and we know the upshot in that old fable.

And then there's the bowl-off. Some of the world's leading cricketers between them missed a set of stumps in 16 successive deliveries. It was funny for a couple of minutes but you wanted it to end well before it did. You might hear an excuse about bowlers these days being trained to aim about 15cm outside the off stump where our old friend the corridor of uncertainty is situated. So trained that when presented with an open, unguarded target they couldn't readjust the radar.

Remember the tales about bowlers so accurate they could land a ball on a spot the size of an envelope. This lot couldn't have hit a bus. In a game, several would have been called wide.

And finally, memo Martin Snedden: As you know, Sneds, streakers became boring about 25 years ago. So how about we go the Australian way? As New Zealand Cricket's CEO, why not start the wheels rolling to get some law in place and hammer the financial daylights out of the flesh-flashing invaders.

But I'll tell you one funny story. True, too. A few seasons back, a bloke wearing only a pair of black shorts hurdled the fence at the Melbourne Cricket Ground, put his head down and took off across the vast oval. The security guards were slow to react, this bloke was quick and he made it to the fence on the far side of the ground, which as you'll appreciate Sneds is a fair effort. He hurdled the fence and with guards in pursuit ducked into a men's toilets.

Ah ha, said the guards. Got him. They marched into the toilets - to find 12 chaps standing facing the urinal wearing nothing but black shorts.