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.