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Should "home" umpires be re-introduced into test cricket?

Slow Love™

International Captain
tooextracool said:
with so much test cricket going on and only 10 umpires on the panel, perhaps the number of poor decisions that we have seen over the last year or so, particularly from bucknor, might have to do with the fact that they are umpiring too much????
This might be true, but wouldn't increasing the size of the international panel take care of this? I'm not sure I see where re-introducing home umpires will be the magical solution to this problem.

In addition, the size of the international panel kinda worries me. We can't find more than 10 umpires in the whole cricket-playing world that can meet international requirements? I guess the field's in dire trouble if that's true.
 
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tooextracool

International Coach
Slow Love™ said:
This might be true, but wouldn't increasing the size of the international panel take care of this? I'm not sure I see where re-introducing home umpires will be the magical solution to this problem.

In addition, the size of the international panel kinda worries me. We can't find more than 10 umpires in the whole cricket-playing world that can meet international requirements? I guess the field's in dire trouble if that's true.
i dont think that home umpires is the magical solution to the problem, but i do think that no ODI umpire would be biased towards his home team.
at the moments there are simply not enough umpires on the panel, the ones that are on it seem to have gotten worse since they've been on it. certainly bowden and bucknor's reputation have gone down over the last couple of years.
 

Richard

Cricket Web Staff Member
marc71178 said:
It depends if it were 8 genuine dismissals or not.
It wouldn't and you know it wouldn't.
The minute anyone picked-up on a home Umpire giving that many dismissals his team's way there'd be conspiracy-theorists. Same way there are the minute you get that fact about Mike Riley giving us all those penalties in his games at Old Trafford. People have a go without taking a look at the circumstances (and no, I confess I don't know how many were certain penalties and how many were dubious, but the point is people just go off on one without consulting with this, just looking at the stats) and exactly the same would happen here.
 
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Richard

Cricket Web Staff Member
Jono said:
Why bother? The whole idea of removing home umpires was to remove allegations of home bias, and it has worked. The only allegations of bias (on this board and from what I've hear in conversations with people) have been against Bucknor, and that's all. No one else has really complained about bias. We've complained about bad umpiring, but there's obviously been no malice involved.

It'd be a step backwards in my opinion, and I don't think Aleem Dar has done badly. I reckon he's done pretty well, especially his handling of the Warne situation.

As I type this, Bucknor made a pretty bad decision against McCullum with a caught behind. Now if that was an Aussie umpire, allegations may arise. But since it's not, I'm sure it'll be passed as "Oh well, bad umpiring happens". The removal of home umpires was a rare good move by the ICC.
This sums-up: the principal reason, as mooted by Graeme Wright in Wisden 2001, is not the upping of standards, it is the removal of the cause of so much player and spectator dissent - the suspicion that, deep down, the home Umpire is biased.
I'd also like to add that Mark Taylor's commentary regarding the issue was stupid. "The team that plays aggressively usually gets the decisions going their way". Says who? That's just plain stupid really.
Yes, it's a rather odd theory, but a popular one in today's fast-scoring-crazy game.
 

Richard

Cricket Web Staff Member
Slow Love™ said:
This might be true, but wouldn't increasing the size of the international panel take care of this? I'm not sure I see where re-introducing home umpires will be the magical solution to this problem.

In addition, the size of the international panel kinda worries me. We can't find more than 10 umpires in the whole cricket-playing world that can meet international requirements? I guess the field's in dire trouble if that's true.
This is another very important consideration - I don't know whether the heavy workload affects standards - it's certainly possible - but beyond question it is unfair on men mainly in their 50s and 60s to do all that travelling and time-zone-skipping.
The Panel should be at least 14 strong IMO. Certainly there are enough good Umpires around.
Of course, the technology situation won't go away; it'll be debated and debated, and eventually sense will prevail and we'll get no-balls called in a way that will totally avoid unfair calls and make sure every single one is caught. Ideally heavier punishments will be introduced, too. Try and stamp the things out for good. Hopefully we might also get an end to this insane thing where catches being viewed on camera is made as difficult as possible, and get 'keepers with white gloves, ICC-reprisentative cameramen instead of it being on TV-producers' whims, and sane guidelines putting the major responsibility on the field Umpires with TV being used only when the catch is closer to a camera than the field. Oh, and hopefully we'll get Snicko used wherever possible, and hopefully we'll get an end to this insane thing about bump-balls not being consultable. Simple question: did the ball carry? That covers bump-balls and "was the catch taken cleanly?"
Trouble is, as with almost everything in cricket, we'll have to wait for longer than would be ideal. I mean, it took, what, 200 years for the no-ball\wide ruling to be changed to the only thing that made sense - the runs, plus whatever is scored off the ball.
 

wpdavid

Hall of Fame Member
I can't see that the present sitution is tenable, if we want the best umpires to stay in the game more than a few years. The amount of time they have to stay away from home & family is crazy, and we need to find a more civilised way of running things. That's true for the players as well, but that's another matter.

Although "neutral" umpires have largely removed the acusations of bias that we sometimes used to hear, that would be less of a problem if we made sensible use of technology to correct any glaring errors made by the ump's.
 

Richard

Cricket Web Staff Member
It is far more accurate than human eyes\ears, and it's far more accurate than a raw film\sound playback.
No, it's not going to be able to tell everything it's asked, but nor can anything in this life. If there is doubt, it goes to the batsman.
 

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