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Home umpires biased with lbws - study

Fuller Pilch

Hall of Fame Member
Here is a newspaper article about a stats study published in the journal of the royal stats society which shows home umpires give disproportionate nos of lbws. It looks as if subcontinental and convict umpires are the worst offenders:

Gemma Ware: Howzat? Home umpires more biased - study

It is tough enough to win away from home as it is and this doesn't help
 
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jcas0167

International Debutant
No surprise, although I found this interesting.

"Strikingly, we found that the advantage to home teams from home umpires was strongest in the final two innings of the match," said Gregory-Smith, a lecturer in economics at the University of Sheffield. "So there is little evidence that bias towards home teams from home umpires was driven primarily by crowd pressure.
 
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TNT

Banned
This report assumes that every team should get exactly the same amount of LBW's per match.

If you look at Australia since Jan 2000 in home matches they have lost 1135 wickets and taken 1546 wickets, I would expect them to have a higher percentage of LBW's than the opposition, around 20% in fact.
 

Riggins

International Captain
This report assumes that every team should get exactly the same amount of LBW's per match.

If you look at Australia since Jan 2000 in home matches they have lost 1135 wickets and taken 1546 wickets, I would expect them to have a higher percentage of LBW's than the opposition, around 20% in fact.
Why? Just taking more wickets shouldn't necessarily change the distribution of how the wickets fall.


Edit: I agree that some bowlers are more likely to get more LBW's than others, obviously.
 

Binkley

U19 Captain
This report assumes that every team should get exactly the same amount of LBW's per match.
Does it say that? I tried to look at the source paper but it is behind a paywall, but the newspaper report doesn't state that. I would be extraordinarily surprised if something got published in any sort of reputable journal with that kind of flaw in the analysis.
 

TNT

Banned
Does it say that? I tried to look at the source paper but it is behind a paywall, but the newspaper report doesn't state that. I would be extraordinarily surprised if something got published in any sort of reputable journal with that kind of flaw in the analysis.
From the report:

They found that in matches overseen by two home umpires, batsmen from the visiting team were given out lbw about 16 per cent more often than their opponents from the home side.
 

RossTaylorsBox

Cricket Web: All-Time Legend
OK, so it seems that:

"They found that in matches overseen by two home umpires, batsmen from the visiting team were given out lbw about 16 per cent more often than their opponents from the home side."

is just the descriptive statistics used at the start of the paper without any of the authors' analysis. They do control for things like superiority in home conditions and the conditions themselves in a separate analysis. I don't think the author of the news article actually read the paper properly.
 

RossTaylorsBox

Cricket Web: All-Time Legend
"There is a very clear pattern. The magnitude of home advantage is biggest when there are two home umpires and smallest when there are two neutral umpires. The marginal effect when there are two home umpires is −0.284, implying a decrease of approximately 21 percentage points in the number of LBW decisions per innings given against home teams. This is roughly equivalent to one extra LBW decision in favour of the home team in every innings, which is certainly enough to have a major influence on the outcome of the match. The effect is halved (−0.134) when there is one neutral umpire and reduced again when both umpires are neutral, to the point of statistical insignificance."

So having two home umpires is the same as one favourable decision every innings. Authors also conclude it's due to favouritism as opposed to the crowd which as the previous poster said, is pretty interesting.
 

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