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Cricket Spectator
Dear friends, below given is an article appeared in a cricket website, plz.give your sincere opinon on the subject matter:
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Unaccountable umpires, and falling short of change
Amit Varma
A number of people have written in, responding to my earlier posts on why we need to use technology to help umpires ("Why umpires should welcome technology", "More Luddites answered, but no early adopters" and "Falling short of change"), pointing out how the awful umpiring mistakes in the first Test between India and Australia should not have taken place, and could have been avoided with technology.
Australia played better cricket and would probably have won the Test anyway, but India would have had a far greater chance of a fightback if their openers weren't both victims of umpiring mistakes in the second innings. Billy Bowden, who gave Virender Sehwag lbw after a massive inside-edge, had also wrongly given Irfan Pathan out in India's first innings, ending a 60-run rearguard partnership. Sehwag was astonished at the decision, like everybody else who saw it, and expressed his view to Bowden on his way back to the pavilion. He ended up getting fined 65% of his match fee for dissent.
One of the commentators on television suggested that it all evens out, and that Pathan being dropped at an irrelevant juncture in the second innings was an example of that. That is nonsense. Even if the number of batsmen wrongly given out is equal to the number of batsmen wrongly reprieved, the decisions would only even out in a statistical sense, and not in terms of their consequences. A batsman's career can be affected by a wrong decision, and the result of a Test match influenced by two or three. At the level of individuals, and of teams, it does not even out.
Even if it did, two wrongs would hardly make a right. That is a ludicrous argument – call it Luddite objection No. 16.
There is another big issue here, beyond that of using technology: are umpires accountable? When players make mistakes consistently, they get dropped. But when umpires make repeated errors, as opposed to the occasional understandable mistake, they get away with it. The ICC supposedly has a mechanism of review to deal with this, but it is not working.
Steve Bucknor might have been a good umpire at his peak, but as I have argued earlier ("On age and technology"), he is past his sell-by date. That is not merely my conclusion – the Indian team, in their official review of the umpires to the ICC, slammed him repeatedly through India's last tour of Australia, and the VB Series that followed. Nevertheless, Bucknor officiated during the India-Pakistan series, messing up again. And despite this repeated history of errors, despite the feedback process that the Indian side has constantly availed of, Bucknor is still officiating at this level, and still goofing up. His officious and arrogant attitude towards players has also, remarkably, gone unpunished. (As Harsha Bhogle says in an excellent piece in The Indian Express, "A judge cannot have the demeanour of a lawyer.")
The ICC is erring, in two ways. One, it is not making umpires accountable enough; and two, it is defining dissent too harshly. Whether Sehwag went over the line or not depends on what he said, which is not yet known, but too often batsmen have been reprimanded for just shaking their heads at a wrong decision, or looking at their bat to indicate that there was an edge, while umpires get away with mistake after mistake, which naturally encourages them to become, as Bhogle described Bucknor, "intrusive and bossy".
Of course, both issues will become irrelevant if the ICC uses technology, and eliminates these mistakes forever. How much longer must we wait till that happens?
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Unaccountable umpires, and falling short of change
Amit Varma
A number of people have written in, responding to my earlier posts on why we need to use technology to help umpires ("Why umpires should welcome technology", "More Luddites answered, but no early adopters" and "Falling short of change"), pointing out how the awful umpiring mistakes in the first Test between India and Australia should not have taken place, and could have been avoided with technology.
Australia played better cricket and would probably have won the Test anyway, but India would have had a far greater chance of a fightback if their openers weren't both victims of umpiring mistakes in the second innings. Billy Bowden, who gave Virender Sehwag lbw after a massive inside-edge, had also wrongly given Irfan Pathan out in India's first innings, ending a 60-run rearguard partnership. Sehwag was astonished at the decision, like everybody else who saw it, and expressed his view to Bowden on his way back to the pavilion. He ended up getting fined 65% of his match fee for dissent.
One of the commentators on television suggested that it all evens out, and that Pathan being dropped at an irrelevant juncture in the second innings was an example of that. That is nonsense. Even if the number of batsmen wrongly given out is equal to the number of batsmen wrongly reprieved, the decisions would only even out in a statistical sense, and not in terms of their consequences. A batsman's career can be affected by a wrong decision, and the result of a Test match influenced by two or three. At the level of individuals, and of teams, it does not even out.
Even if it did, two wrongs would hardly make a right. That is a ludicrous argument – call it Luddite objection No. 16.
There is another big issue here, beyond that of using technology: are umpires accountable? When players make mistakes consistently, they get dropped. But when umpires make repeated errors, as opposed to the occasional understandable mistake, they get away with it. The ICC supposedly has a mechanism of review to deal with this, but it is not working.
Steve Bucknor might have been a good umpire at his peak, but as I have argued earlier ("On age and technology"), he is past his sell-by date. That is not merely my conclusion – the Indian team, in their official review of the umpires to the ICC, slammed him repeatedly through India's last tour of Australia, and the VB Series that followed. Nevertheless, Bucknor officiated during the India-Pakistan series, messing up again. And despite this repeated history of errors, despite the feedback process that the Indian side has constantly availed of, Bucknor is still officiating at this level, and still goofing up. His officious and arrogant attitude towards players has also, remarkably, gone unpunished. (As Harsha Bhogle says in an excellent piece in The Indian Express, "A judge cannot have the demeanour of a lawyer.")
The ICC is erring, in two ways. One, it is not making umpires accountable enough; and two, it is defining dissent too harshly. Whether Sehwag went over the line or not depends on what he said, which is not yet known, but too often batsmen have been reprimanded for just shaking their heads at a wrong decision, or looking at their bat to indicate that there was an edge, while umpires get away with mistake after mistake, which naturally encourages them to become, as Bhogle described Bucknor, "intrusive and bossy".
Of course, both issues will become irrelevant if the ICC uses technology, and eliminates these mistakes forever. How much longer must we wait till that happens?
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