the field was applicable. This ambiguity was removed by setting a clear demarcation point between the two as the point when the striker has "finished playing the ball": before this point, handling the ball applies; thereafter, obstructing the field applies. The result was that only the striker could be dismissed handled ball, and only during the short period when the striker was playing (or attempting to play) the ball, either as a first or subsequent stroke. The act of handing the ball back to the fielding side, mentioned above, was therefore no longer regarded as the striker playing the ball, resulting in this event then being dealt with under obstructing the field. In March 2017 it was announced by the MCC that the law on handled the ball would be completely removed and subsumed into the law on obstructing the field. This means that the act of handling the ball will still result in the batsman's dismissal, but will now always be recorded as obstructing the field. The new law came into effect on 1 October 2017. In total, there were 63 occasions on which a batsman has been given out handled the ball in first-class cricket and 5 instances in List A cricket. Brodribb suggests that it is likely that there should have been a significant number more dismissals than there have been for handling the ball: in addition to the cases where batsman have returned the ball to the fielding side without permission, there are records of cases in which the umpires have been reticent to uphold an appeal. On one such instance, the umpire David Constant rejected an appeal against Younis Ahmed, saying that he thought the appeal was not serious. Occasions in international cricket The first occasion of a batsman being given out handled the ball in international cricket occurred during a Test match between South Africa and England in Cape Town in 1957. In the second innings of the match, the South African Russell Endean padded away a delivery from Jim Laker. The ball looped off his pads into the air, and was falling towards his stumps until Endean instinctively knocked it away with his free hand. He later suggested that he had "thought of heading it away, but that seemed too theatrical." The second instance came 22 years later during a bad-tempered series between Australia and Pakistan that also involved another rare dismissal method: