In an excellent interview filled with some textbook 'Not in my day' righteous anger, Sir Vivian Richards has lamented the wearing of helmets and body armour and the effect it has on some modern batsmen.

"That's the worst way anybody can be thinking, that you should cover yourself in a suit of armour, to make yourself brave, or to enable you to hook - when you never hooked in your life - just because you've got a helmet on. That's rubbish."

There's no doubt that the advantage of bat over ball is partly due to the excellent protection that batsmen now enjoy, but surely other factors, including dull pitches, the workload on quicker bowlers, smaller grounds, better bats and the new skills that Twenty20 competition is breeding have just as big a part to play.

Even if it helmets were ruining the game, it's hard to see how they could now be outlawed: you can't un-invent technology, and it's inconceivable that the ICC could forbid the wearing of something that could save a batsman's life. Imagine if they changed the ruling and someone was killed.

It certainly seems that batsmen get hit on the helmet a hell of a lot more than they used to get hit on the head, so perhaps techniques have changed and got worse. In England, players under 18 years old have had to wear helmets since 2000 - so the days when a county player might never have batted without a lid must be very near, if not already upon us. Pity the crop of players that would be the first helmet-less guinea pigs. Anyway, it will never happen.

Sir Viv also told The Observer that the West Indies enjoyed seeing how an opponent would react to the punishment.

"I remember the days when a guy would get hit, next delivery we'd say, 'let's see if he's got some stomach or not'," he said, adding that the surest way to tell if an opponent had no bottle was the step away to the leg-side next delivery.

Of course, Sir Viv, who famously never wore a helmet himself, has got more right to speak than almost anyone else alive about the matter. But it must have made batting a bit easier, knowing that you had Andy Roberts, Malcolm Marshall, Joel Garner et al on your side - not just because you didn't have to face them - but because you knew that they could return with interest any punishment that their Windies batting colleagues received.

In one of Sir Ian Botham's many autobiographies, 1986's It Sort Of Clicks, Botham writes: "At Weston in 1981, we had to face Cowans and Hughes on a dangerous pitch. Viv's first ball from Cowans spun his cap around. I was out first ball. I had backed away a yard to square. Viv said he'd had enough of this bravery/ignorance thing and I agreed."

Maybe if he'd had to play for England in the 1980s against the West Indies he might have considered, even for a second, the merits of the lid. Perhaps not, but not all players - in fact, only two or three ever in the history of the game - are as brilliant and dominating as Sir Viv. The rest of them are mere mortals, Sir Viv, and mortals can be killed.

Alan Tyers