How much sympathy can be offered to the umpires?

The answer to this question is highly convoluted and complex. The umpires carry a huge amount of pressure on themselves out in the middle. They are human and do make mistakes.

The point to be noted is that, there are unintentional errors and then the more dangerous intentional errors, which are very common in the lower strata of the game. Either bias towards one team or one individual or at a higher level racism causes these intentional blunders. There is absolutely no doubt in the fact that these intentional cases cannot be excused at any level, in any situation and at any cost. But, the problem is that it is usually the case that the umpire in question is the only one who truly knows whether the decision taken was an honest one. Therefore, however capable an umpire may be, his integrity is more important than anything else as the players and the general public are inclined to excuse a wrong decision more when they believe that the decision was taken in all honesty.

The umpires do a very tough job. The cause of an incorrect decision is important to consider. A great majority of umpires give decisions correctly 100% of the time, based on what they see. The point here is that the decision goes wrong when they don’t see or hear something crucial. Therefore, it is the incomplete or otherwise flawed input and not the processing that goes wrong. An alert umpire will give more correct decisions than one who is not alert. The words of a former test umpire, “All the decisions I gave were right, from what I saw” convey this point clearly. Therefore it has to be noted and reiterated that a good umpire gives all his decisions, without exception correctly, based on what he sees.

Decisions such as the question of whether there is a nick with the ball going down the leg side through to the ‘keeper with the batsman attempting a pull or hook pose problems for the umpire. The reason is the umpire does not get as clear a sight of the incident as he would have been comfortable with due to the angle. The bat-pad decisions are also challenging although these are considerably easier than the decisions previously dealt with. The problem with the bat-pad decisions is that under normal circumstances, the bat and pad are very close to each other, therefore any deflection will happen very fast and what got the first touch and whether there were two touches at all is not clear in the umpire’s mind.

One may argue that a good umpire must be capable of negotiating all these decisions and dealing with them appropriately. This is true, but even the greatest of umpires are human beings and they will make mistakes, more likely in these cases.

Therefore, in difficult decisions such as these, there should be a level of leniency in judging the umpire.

There is one more factor which comes in - the situation. An umpire cannot give a caught behind decision half as easily at the Eden Gardens as against Hove because of the noisy atmosphere at Calcutta. Also, a mistake the umpire makes is given importance on the basis of the victim as well. The uproar caused by Sachin Tendulkar being wrongly declared out will certainly be much more than the similar decision with Alan Donald at the receiving end.

There will be mistakes made and that is the beauty of the game. I hope my opinions are portrayed clearly through this piece.-BS