In the past fortnight cricket in Australia and abroad has brewed seriously heated arguments, mainly due to decisions which some say changed the direction of an entire test match in Australia’s favour.
While reporters were quick to find (or is that hire?) the usual group of excited Indians burning effigiesI here in Australia everybody seemed polarised by the walk/no walk argument.
What the news media ignored – the question people should be asking each other is; why is there any room for error in cricket decisions in this 21st century?
Another sport competing with cricket on the box this year, Tennis, even allows players on-court to challenge any decision they see as wrong, whereby a hawk-eye bounce simulator pinpoints the exact fall of a ball. All human eyes can be overruled by it, and more than a few bad judgements have surfaced.
As with tennis (and any other televised sport nowadays) essentially everybody watching cricket from home is getting superior vision than the umpires; more replays, angles, slow-motion, heat vision, even estimated bounce projections. Umpires have proximity and experience as their only allies, whilst having the liability of concentrating endlessly without distraction and at risk of being caught up in an exciting moment.
The sad truth is, with all this technology we’re all better umpires than any professional in the industry.II The infamous example; when Andrew Symonds led Australia to a resounding victory in the second test after dodging what the umpire saw as close calls. We saw Symonds get out, from multiple angles and as clear as day. A single umpire using his own eyesight ruled against what millions of people could see. Twice.
The solution is a radical one, and there’s no gentle way to propose it; leave one umpire on bowling end with an earpiece, and have an umpire box off-field for informed decisions, which are fed to the on-field umpire.
I’m not old enough to remember if there was much argument about the addition of the third umpire,III but I can guess there was a fair share of detractors. Similarly, the main reason that there’s still umpires on the field today is tradition. While skill and tactics might be constantly evolving, rules and tradition seem to be set in stone with a game as old as cricket. Drastically changing something as fundamental as on-field umpires’ decision making abilities is no mean feat. That, with the collateral damage of less umpires being required, surely seems to make for a ludicrous proposal.
You can often hear the commentators’ breathy pause when they see a bad decision. They (just as we) have access to all the vision they need to make a decision, yet are left only to weasel-word and mince their way around one man’s mistake. What if they could make the decisions instead of discussing them?
As for slandering and in regards to who-said-what (another hot topic at the moment), there’s even a simple solution to once and for all solve disputes. Sound should be recorded on the pitch and stored, not for public ears, but for reference if somebody does raise an issue. Considering the game is played in an open field, how hard could it be to have something the likes of audio-grabbing directional amplifiersIV pointed at any conversations between batsmen and the field? The key is recording everything, so any complaints can be swiftly decided upon. No sport on a world class level should face national boycotts because of what somebody might have said – courts of law find it inadmissible, yet the ICC takes it seriously. Again, you can bet all sides on field would be against any such recording.
There’s simply too much invested into Cricket for these two things not to happen, and it’s a real shame (not to mention diminishing) for the game to repeatedly make the news, not for the performances, but from fallout due to the lack of evolution of this great game.
On the flipside, I overheard somebody last week with another plan, “Just ban all the replay camera angles. If we only see an umpire’s view, this would be a non-issue.”
Easier, though I’m sure not so popular. 
- And just who makes these pathetic likenesses? I can see a growth industry in Professional Effigy Services. [↩]
- And not to say that umpires aren’t skilled, being able to make calls using only line of sight gets more amazing as you think about the variables. [↩]
- Which, if you’re cricket deprived, is a third-party whom the umpires can call upon to make a judgement with difficult decisions. Interestingly enough, they use replays to decide. [↩]
- Which I originally saw in Enemy of the State, and later for sale as a kids toy; go figure. [↩]
