Television killed the umpiring star

Kartikeya Date in Cricinfo

At its annual general meeting in July, the ICC decided to reduce the margin of the umpire's-call element in the Decision Review System. The old rule required that at least 50% of the ball must be hitting at least 50% of a stump in the estimate provided by the ball-tracking model. The change, which comes into effect this month, now requires at least 50% of the ball to be hitting any part of a stump, or, as the ICC phrased it: "The size of the zone inside which half the ball needs to hit for a Not Out decision to be reversed to Out will increase, changing to a zone bordered by the outside of off and leg stumps, and the bottom of the bails (formerly the centre of off and leg stumps, and the bottom of the bails)."




The umpire's call has traditionally invited the scorn of a number of prominent players as well as commentators. The rule change is a victory for the view that umpire's call is excessively deferential to the umpire. In this essay, which extends ideas I have written about previously, I consider what this change says about the past, present and future of umpiring.

****

Contradictions abound with the DRS. It was invented, according to the ICC, to correct obvious umpiring mistakes. But it is used most frequently to litigate on marginal umpiring decisions. The purpose of the player review was to allow players to question umpiring decisions where they knew the umpires had got it wrong. Yet players routinely use the review speculatively, to see if they can get a marginal reversal. The DRS was invented because umpires were deemed to be experts who made clear (or obvious) mistakes from time to time. It was not intended to make up for any perceived shortcoming in an umpire's expertise. It was intended to make up for the human tendency to make mistakes in real time. This distinction is important.

If an umpire lacked expertise, then no matter how many times he or she saw a particular lbw appeal, the right decision would not be reliably reached. But if an umpire simply made a mistake in real time, it would be recognised on replay. As an analogy, think of the times where you have made a mistake adding up two numbers. This is a mistake. It does not occur because you don't know the correct way to add two numbers. If you didn't know how to add, no matter how many times you looked at the problem, you wouldn't know how to reliably calculate the correct answer.

The DRS was not intended to make up for any perceived shortcoming in an umpire's expertise

Not only is the DRS only rarely used for this kind of correction, the process used to identify mistakes - the player review - fails about 75% of the time. At the 2015 World Cup, 583 umpiring decisions were made (including 312 lbw and 229 catches): an umpiring decision is made any time an umpire answers an appeal, so not all dismissals involve umpiring decisions and nor do all umpiring decisions result in dismissals. Eighty-four were reviewed and only 20 of those were successful; 57 reviews were for lbw appeals, of which only eight were successful. According to data provided by the ICC, in all international cricket between April 2013 and March 2016 in which the DRS was used, one in six umpiring decisions was reviewed by players. Three out of four player reviews failed. Umpiring decisions on lbw appeals were reviewed more frequently - about one in every four. Four out of five such reviews were unsuccessful.

Many players, as well as TV commentators, often betray a misunderstanding about the DRS, beginning with the basic question of what it is. In cricket the umpire can choose between two options when answering an appeal - out and not out. The DRS is a system for reviewing the umpire's answer. It is not a system for providing a new answer to the original appeal by setting aside the umpire's first answer.

The DRS is also frequently the catch-all term for the suite of technologies used within the review system, technologies that are also not well understood. The most widespread misunderstanding is about ball-tracking and the notion that the estimate of the path of the ball from pad to stumps is not an estimate but a statement of fact. This is particularly puzzling, since it suggests that players and commentators misunderstand the lbw law. A leg-before decision is built on the umpire hypothesising about an event that never occurs, that never occurred and never will occur.

----Also read

Abolish the LBW - it has no place in the modern world

----

The question that must be answered on an lbw appeal is: "Had the pad not been in the way, would the ball have gone on to hit the stumps?" The answer to this question is not knowable in the same way as the answer to "Did the ball touch the edge of the bat?" In the case of an edge, the event occurs. The DRS includes technologies that enable an answer to this inquiry. No comparable data can possibly be available in the case of lbw. The estimate of the ball-tracker is just that: an estimate. This is why marginal cases, where the estimate contends that the ball is clipping the stumps, are classified as umpire's call. The probability of an estimate being wrong by an inch is exponentially lower than it being wrong by a quarter of an inch. The point of umpire's call is simply to ensure that only those decisions that can be refuted should be overturned. All other decisions should be allowed to stand.

The rise of the DRS is tied in to the way the authority of the umpires has been undermined by players and broadcasters over the years Cameron Spencer / © Getty Images

Yet, even Kumar Sangakkara evidently misses this point. Perhaps he was caught up in the disappointment of the moment - his former team-mates had just been denied an lbw thanks to a review by the England batsman when he tweeted: "High time the ICC got rid of this umpires [sic] call. If the ball is hitting the stumps it should be out on review regardless of umps decision." Later he added: "is a feather of a nick marginal if it doesn't show up on hotspot but only on snicko? Then why use technology." Sangakkara is not alone in misunderstanding that when an lbw review returns umpire's call, the ball-tracking estimate is telling us: "This may go on to hit the stumps, but it cannot be said with sufficient certainty."

Now it is true that what the ball-tracking companies consider to be sufficient certainty and what the ICC considers to be so is not the same thing. Different providers use different methods for predicting the ball's path. They are also not equally confident about the reliability of the predictions. Ian Taylor, the head of Virtual Eye, has previously suggested that TV umpires be given an override switch that allows them to ignore the ball-tracking estimate in certain circumstances. Paul Hawkins, of Hawk-Eye Innovations, is far more confident of his company's ball-tracking predictions.

But if we take the criticisms of Sangakkara, and Shane Warne and Ian Botham among others, to their logical conclusion, then by eliminating the umpire's call, and with it the idea of the marginal decision itself, there is no longer any need for the umpire. If the review is for the appeal and not the decision, then why is the decision necessary in the first place? Why make umpires stand in the sun for six hours if their expert judgement, from the best position in the house, is not needed?

Why not use only DRS technologies instead of an umpire? Almost every single thing the umpire does on the field can now be done from beyond the boundary. The umpires could sit in a nice air-conditioned office in the pavilion with a dazzling array of screens and controls. They could even operate the electronic scoreboard from there, instead of signalling boundaries and extras to the scorers.

A leg-before decision is built on the umpire hypothesising about an event that never occurs, that never occurred and never will occur

One practical answer is that these technologies are expensive. We will still need umpires at the lower levels. But without the incentive of being able to become an international umpire, what might happen to the quality of umpiring at the lower levels?

As a scientific matter, if one is to consider replacing the umpire with such technologies then the responsible thing to do is to consider two kinds of error. First is the margin of error of the technology itself. Take the ball-tracker. The amount of information available for each delivery is not exactly the same. For instance, the faster the delivery, the fewer the number of frames of video available from which the path of the ball can be traced. And because the same amount of data is not available for each delivery, all projected paths cannot be predicted with equal certainty.

This is not to say that most paths cannot be predicted with sufficiently little uncertainty. In an interview in 2011, Hawkins explained that the accuracy of the prediction is more binary than one might imagine. There is either sufficient data for a reliable prediction or there isn't. One example of a situation where there isn't sufficient data is for yorkers. The ball-tracking system designates any situation in which the distance between the ball's pitching point and the point of impact is less than 40cm to be an "extreme" lbw. A mistake by the ball-tracking system in an lbw review involving Shan Masood about two years ago may have been due to this condition.

Before ball-tracking, the decision against Masood could have been argued two ways - one, that the ball was very likely to miss leg stump, and the other, that Masood had moved a long way across and was hit on the back heel inside the crease. The ball did not have much to travel. This would have introduced doubt into the idea that the ball would have missed the stumps.

If we eliminate the idea of umpire's call, and with it the idea of the marginal decision itself, is there a need for the umpire?Richard Heathcote / © Getty Images

In the ball-tracking era, with the increased number of mini-decisions in the chain between the original appeal and the final decision, there are more points where people can make mistakes than before. What's more, there are more people who can make mistakes. The Masood lbw did involve operator error according to Hawk-Eye. The upshot of all this is that the cricketing question of whether or not the decision against Masood was reasonably defensible was set aside in favour of doubts about the plausibility of the ball-tracking estimate.

Hawk-Eye did once suggest visualising the confidence of each prediction by drawing an "uncertainty ellipse" around the ball. In cases where there was sufficient information to make the prediction, the ellipse showing a calculated error would be extremely close to the ball. Showing the ellipse, however minor the error might be, would continually remind viewers of two facts: first, that the animation they were watching was an estimate, and second, that the estimate was probabilistic. This was rejected by broadcasters, who preferred a "definitive" visualisation.

I am inclined to accept that the mathematical prediction models are generally reliable. As more testing is carried out, and with advances in hardware, these models will continue to improve. But even if we assume that the model is good, and its least confident prediction is still sufficiently confident, we also have to make allowances for shortcomings - those factors it is not designed to account for. I am not referring to atmospherics, or the peculiar traits of a cricket ball at different stages of its existence (the model's solution of tracking movement has an elegant way of accounting for these). Instead I refer to, for instance, the limits of video - the path of the ball from the bowler's hand to the batsman is constructed using multiple video frames from multiple tracking cameras; or the non-standard nature of cricket stadiums, which could introduce limits to the extent of calibration possible; or the difference in the quality of video available in different countries.

Every city in the world that requires the certification of building designs before construction requires that concrete structures be "over-designed" to include a factor of safety. This is usually a matter, for example, of increasing the calculated beam depth for a given span by a certain percentage. This is done to cover for uncertainties that the calculation cannot take into account. The umpire's call is similar.

****

Connoisseurs and administrators have dreamed of using technology to help umpires for decades. But the development of the DRS is not solely the result of an innocent, abstract desire to help umpiring. Its evolution is a direct consequence of the authority of the umpire being undermined by players, aided and abetted by broadcasters. It was not inevitable that technical assistance for umpiring decisions should take the form of a review initiated by players. Nor was it inevitable that the very technologies used to enhance the entertainment value of the television broadcast should become tools of adjudication.

Umpires are right to be fearful. Their authority has been systematically dismantled from the commentary box

The very design of the DRS betrays its impulses. If the point of the system were to correct obvious mistakes, why would such sophisticated technologies be necessary? Shouldn't an obvious error, by its definition, be obvious? Instead, it appears that a central impulse was to ensure that the very technologies that were used by broadcasters to litigate umpiring decisions be used in the review. Given the pressure the umpires had been placed under, it would not have been viable to use a system of reviewing decisions that did not include these technologies.

Consider now examples of the oldest form of review - requesting replays for run-out calls - to see how umpires have begun to question their own expertise. Matters have reached a stage where they reflexively draw a TV screen in the air even for the politest, mildest appeals, where it is patently clear the batsman is in. The replay often shows him well inside the crease, or even past the stumps. There are arguments to be made for being safe rather than sorry, but there are instances when umpires signal for the replay even as the batsman is walking off to the pavilion. This is motivated by fear, not caution.

And umpires are right to be fearful. Their authority has been systematically dismantled from the commentary box. To see why, we must understand the model of the TV "argument", the central feature of which is balance, not accuracy or depth or nuance (which lead to complexity, which is boring for TV).

If one person takes the position that the earth is flat, and the other that the earth is round, then a "balanced" argument treats both positions to be equally valid. Here's how it might happen during commentary. An important batsman is given not out at a crucial stage. One commentator makes an effort to explain why the decision was marginal and why it might have reasonably gone either way, that the umpire did not make a mistake. The co-commentator, either by way of "balance", or in an attempt to live up to a TV persona, responds by saying he thought it was out and the fact that it was not given is a mistake. One side concludes the earth is round. The other disagrees. If there is time, they have a "debate", which usually amounts to the two claims being restated in different ways until time runs out.

The "balanced" argument comes with the following corollary in cricket commentary - as long as an umpire is praised for getting a decision right, it is perfectly reasonable to excoriate him for getting a decision wrong. The rightness and wrongness of marginal decisions is, by definition, doubtful. But the manufactured certainty of a visualisation like the ball-tracker enables a thorough excoriation, minimising marginality. One commentator will offer the careful, nuanced live commentary. The other will see the ball-tracker depicting the ball clipping leg stump and say, "This is where umpire's call saves the batsman despite a bad original decision." Of course, if the ball-tracker shows the ball missing by a whisker, the same commentator will praise the original decision. The difference between the two stances is often no more than a fraction of an inch. There is no cricketing merit in having such divergent opinions about instances separated by fractions of an inch, but it makes for great TV; never mind that it undermines the authority of the umpire.

Under the DRS not only are there more points where people can make mistakes than before, there are more people involved in the process, who can make mistakes © Getty Images

Too many commentators seem willing to accept the idea that a decision is worth reviewing just because a player does not like it. If not, the vast number of bad player reviews would bother them at least as much as the marginal lbw decision going against their team seems to. They don't. You never hear of how consistently unsuccessful players are at reviews. That's one statistic commentators rarely track.

Their job precludes them from saying "It could reasonably have gone either way" too often. That response makes everybody but the most serious cricket fans deeply unhappy. And if only serious cricket fans watched cricket, elementary economics says that it would not interest most broadcasters. The point is not that commentators are inherently bad. That matters are not as simple as this is palpably evident from the fact that the same commentators sound different depending on the broadcaster they work for. Rather, the point is that the DRS is the product of the complex interplay of cricket and the lucrative show business of its broadcast. Commentators constitute the high-profile face of the show-business side and usually have a deep history on the cricketing side, and hence are central characters.

As conclusion, here is an idiosyncratic history of umpiring, told through three umpiring decisions and their presentation. It constitutes a prehistory of this latest change in the rules. On the fourth evening at Adelaide Oval on a day late in 1999, Sachin Tendulkar was given out lbw after ducking into a Glenn McGrath bouncer. The ball didn't rise on a wearing, pre-drop-in-era wicket. Ian Chappell and Sunil Gavaskar were on commentary, and after describing the action, Chappell said:

"Dangerous lbw decision for an umpire to give because there are so many moving parts. It's not like the batsman being hit on the pad. There's a lot of movement when the batsman's ducking like that. It's hit him up under the back of the arm. [Pauses as the ball leaves McGrath's hand and reaches Tendulkar] Oh, it's not the easiest decision to give at all. Because with all those things moving, you've got to be very sure."

Gavaskar was interested in why Tendulkar chose to duck. He pointed out that the short leg probably worried Tendulkar and made him choose not to play at the ball. Chappell and Gavaskar had been discussing, even before the appeal, how ducking was likely to be risky given the uneven bounce. There was no Hawk-Eye. But between the video and the commentary, it was clear to the viewer what had occurred. Australia had set a trap and it had worked. The decision McGrath won was bold but reasonable. It was possible to reasonably disagree with Daryl Harper, but it could not be successfully argued that he was definitely wrong.

Too many commentators seem willing to accept the idea that a decision is worth reviewing just because a player does not like it

Nearly 12 years later in Mohali, Tendulkar against Pakistan in a World Cup semi-final. In the 11th over of India's innings, Saeed Ajmal got a ball to grip and turn past Tendulkar's forward defensive. On commentary, even as Ajmal and Kamran Akmal were seized by the appeal of their cricketing lives, Sourav Ganguly's instinctive reaction was that it looked very close. Sure enough, umpire Ian Gould gave it out.

It was a perfectly reasonable decision. Any umpire who made the same decision could not be faulted. But here was a wrinkle. The ball-tracking estimate showed that the ball would have missed leg stump by what seemed to be a few angstroms. This time the intimately intertwined apparatus constituted by the umpires and the broadcast told us simply that Gould was wrong and Tendulkar was safe. Leg-before decisions were no longer reasonable judgements by human beings. Ganguly's instinctive reaction on commentary was lost amid the manufactured certainty. Cricket's broadcast no longer had time for the subtle idea that close appeals are close because they are close to being out, while close decisions are close because they are more or less equally close to being out and not out.

Four years later, during the knockout stages of the 2015 World Cup, we, the viewers, were finally allowed into the inner sanctum. While a review was in progress, instead of hearing commentators, we heard what the umpires said to each other.

"Let's look at the no-ball. Yes, that looks fine."

"May I see spin-vision when you are ready?"

"Let's see the ball-tracker when you are ready."

"Pitched outside leg."



The ICC's rulebook governing the DRS prescribed these questions. The role umpires were playing could have been played just as well if they were all sitting in a room in front of a television; in the age of the DRS, the umpire has gone from being the expert match manager to all-purpose match clerk. On its own, the change in umpire's call is not the worst idea, even if it is an unnecessary change. But it is a signal that a bad argument has won - another milestone towards the end of the umpire's expertise.

The Specious Logic of a TV Cricket Expert

by Girish Menon

As a regular reader of Cricinfo I started this Easter Monday holiday by reading 'Why Ramiz gets Bangladesh's goat' Jarrod Kimber's sensitive enquiry into why Bangladesh cricket fans react so vehemently to cricket commentator Ramiz Raja. Lack of quality among commentators and highly emotional responses by social media users were the conclusions drawn by Kimber. As was habitual for me I then went on to Youtube where the channel recommended that I watch a post match analysis on the India Australia WT20 cricket match played yesterday at Mohali. I clicked on the suggestion and found that it was a Pakistani TV channel show discussing the match with Brian Lara, Rashid Latif, Saqlain Mushtaq and Glenn McGrath as experts. 

---Also by this writer 

Sreesanth - Another Modern Day Valmiki?

On Walking - Advice for a fifteen year old

----

In the programme Rashid Latif advanced a thesis that Dhoni and Yuvraj collaborated to deceive the umpire Erasmus into giving Steve Smith the Australian captain out caught behind. Rashid admitted that he indulged in similar behaviour in his playing days and recalled an instance in Sharjah when he conspired with Mushtaq Ahmed to get Dravid out in a similar fashion. Glenn McGrath then stated a fact that that the stump microphone had not detected an edge in the Smith dismissal.

Rashid Latif then commented on how a carefully cultivated image enables a cricketer to trick an umpire into giving them the benefit of doubt which enables them to get an unfair advantage in tight situations. He spoke about Gilchrist's carefully built reputation as a walker and how it helped players like him with umpires in situations when the evidence was not clear cut.

From this discussion I realised that in such a situation not using technology gives the benefitting team an unfair advantage. After all the decision to give Smith out (if he was not out?) had a game changing impact on the match with Smith being Australia's in-form batsman. At the same time I'm sure many Indian cricketers will readily admit the number of times they have been at the receiving end of bad decisions because of BCCI's refusal to use technology to help adjudicate umpiring decisions.

However, I was more worried by the specious logic used by the commentator Rashid Latif to insinuate that Dhoni and Yuvraj cheated like he used to in his playing days. Latif's false argument in the world of logic is called 'Shifting the burden of proof'. It consists of putting forward an assertion without justification, on the basis that the audience must disprove it if it is to be rejected.

Madsen Pirie in his book 'How to win every argument' gives another example to help you understand Latif's false logic:

I believe that a secret company of Illuminati has clandestinely directed world events for several hundred years. Prove to me that it isn't so.

Shifting the burden, Pirie writes, is a common fallacy on which rests the world of conspiracy theories, UFOs, monsters, Gods etc. Advocates like Latif make us the viewer accept the burden of proving that his statement is false. As a viewer I would find it difficult if not impossible to disprove his insinuation.

Also, by shifting the onus of proof Latif is able to put forward mischievous views without producing any shred of evidence. This is dishonesty.

Of course the whole programme appeared to have an anti India bias (not surprising) underpinned by the conspiracy theory that events, grounds, pitches and umpires are all collaborating to ensure that India would win the WT20 cup. 

I too felt like Kimber's Bangladesh supporters and realised that the only way India can resolve this shifted burden of proof is by not winning the trophy.

The writer plays for CamKerala CC in the Cambs cricket league.

Cricket - There's more grey to chucking than we might think

Osman Samiuddin in Cricinfo

A decade ago cricket's ancient and embedded hyper-morality crashed into the modern world's burgeoning thirst for reality television. The focus for this communion was Muttiah Muralitharan, and more specifically his action. Two TV networks, ESPN (in India) and the UK's Channel 4, broadcast what were paraded at the time as definitive acquittals of Muralitharan's action, which had till then been called periodically, sanctioned occasionally, and the subject of hysterical debate permanently.

------ALSO READ

I feel for Sachitra Senanayake

------

Muralitharan went through his repertoire of deliveries with a steel-embedded plaster brace around his right arm, from bicep to wrist, and with admirable good nature. He looked a little uneasy in the ESPN show, a little too much like the guinea pig just becoming aware of his centrality to bigger, buffeting winds. But he went about it like a man who felt he needed to.

He bowled to Michael Slater in that one, to recreate match conditions. There was a doctor present too, explaining the unique physical quirks of Muralitharan's wrist, arm and shoulder, though he felt a little like Dr Nick Riviera, whose only residency of note has been on The Simpsons. Ravi Shastri, for ESPN, was quadruply burdened, as host, judge, jury and, eventually, the benefactor who cleared Murali. Shastri did so in the manner with which we are all familiar, effectively hype-mastering a science documentary. For Channel 4, Mark Nicholas managed a sombre posture, considered and inquiring but above all providing a kind of bipartisan seal on matters.

The issue by then had become so divided along racial lines that a non-Asian clearing of Murali felt necessary. That was the ultimate takeaway, of course, that Murali did not chuck. He could not with that steel brace on. Even Slats, an Aussie, said so.

In hindsight it is not so much the details of Murali's case that were important as was the fact that cricket felt the need for this public trial by TV in the first place. Even today, viewing it produces the kind of cringe only a certain kind of reality show does; especially the eagerness with which Muralitharan is cleared, as if he was guilty of some crime.

Though he looks uncomfortable in the ESPN version, Murali looked cheery and eager for Channel 4. He was probably a willing participant, perhaps even an instigator in doing the shows, but that is hardly the point. He was compelled into it by cricket, feeling no other recourse was available to prove that he was not some evil, cheating villain who would leave cricket forever corrupted. That is precisely what umpires such as Ross Emerson and Darrell Hair seemed to think he was, no-balling him with such ugly fervour that it was impossible to avoid feeling a vicarious humiliation at what Murali underwent. Men are prone to delusions when invested with the tiniest bit of authority in any case, but when furnished with a haloed moral authority they become monsters, or cricket umpires.

Hair and Emerson were after all only maintaining professional tradition. In every purge of suspect actions, umpires have led the hounding, right at the front of bloodthirsty crowds. Chuckers (and even the word is so phonetically derisive) have never been just men with kinks in their actions, or have seemed to bowl thus as a natural outcome of the overarm bowling action, which basically predetermines some degree of straightening (as an ICC survey discovered back in 2004). Cricket has treated chuckers as lepers because cricket doesn't have a reliable sense of a scale of bad: it can summon about the same amount of moral outrage for slow over rates as it can for Mankading, intimidatory bowling and match-fixing. It has a spirit nobody can define but one everybody screeches about when it is - regularly and easily - breached. So Murali and Saeed Ajmal walk around with an asterisk floating above them. To their detractors they are asylum seekers who exist only because of the weak-kneed liberalism of a governing body.

Maybe now the urge to purge is suppressed a little but the moralising over suspect actions remains; in the smugness of Australia and England that their offspinners do not bowl doosras, or feel the need to wear long sleeves (Shane Warne, one failed drug test plus one corruption scandal to the good, sniggering at Ajmal's long sleeves in the World T20 is a classic example of cricket's wonky moral scale); in Michael Vaughan tweeting and Stuart Broad responding to a photo of Ajmal in action and, metaphorically, nodding and winking. That yanks into black-and-white territory what is an inherently grey matter.

Suspect actions can be deliberate but they can also be functions of the mechanics of human bodies we do not understand. Could anyone have imagined that a study would find 99% of bowlers in cricket straighten their arm to some degree? What effects do injuries have, as a fairly serious accident did on Ajmal's right forearm when he was younger? How to explain the squirmy spectacle of Shoaib Akhtar being able to bend his elbow in ways that normally ought not to have been possible?

Where, in any case, is the study that sheds light on the exact nature of the advantages gained from greater elbow straightening? It is said that bowling the doosra is impossible without breaking the acceptable degrees of flex, but how to explain Saqlain Mushtaq, the pioneer, who did it with almost no visible bend at all? He even bowled it under the eyes of Hair and Emerson and elicited not a squeak, so he must have been fine, right? Even if we make the crazy assumption that post-Murali, Hair might have been chastened?

	Where is the study that sheds light on the exact nature of the advantages gained from greater elbow straightening?

****

Cricket cannot continue being blind to the grey of this issue because soon we might be in greyer territory. Last week the ICC's cricket committee expressed its concerns about the identifying, reporting and testing of suspect actions. The processes, they said, need to change.

The primary reason appears to be discontent with the testing labs at the University of Western Australia in Perth, where bowling actions have hitherto undergone testing. The time and cost of sending a bowler that far has always been problematic but now more issues have emerged. One official familiar with the meeting last week says that there was concern about discrepancies in the findings of the Perth labs and others around the world. Apparently the Perth lab has not been following the exact protocols for testing actions that the ICC has laid down, disagreeing with the nature of those protocols.

So the ICC wants to accredit other labs around the world, in England, South Africa and India initially, and ultimately standardise testing protocols and results. The utopian aim is to have testing centres in every Full Member country, so that bowlers can be observed, tested and corrected at domestic level before they get further.

More significantly, they are also testing body sensors that could capture real-time analysis of a bowler's action during a game. These were tested by under-19 players at the recent World Cup but only in net practice, and much more work needs to be done before it goes further. The calibration of the sensors on the arm is a particular issue, especially after players dive in the field.

In time, that will be the least of the problems, because trickier questions will arise. Who will wear sensors in a game? Those who have already undergone testing once? Others we suspect have a kink in their action? Nobody, as the ICC says, is cleared permanently, so everyone is under the scanner theoretically. Singling out someone who may have a kink but has not been tested officially places an undue burden on the bowler and recreates, in a way, the TV trial Murali underwent. How real is real-time? Will we be able to see the results after each ball, after each over, after each session, after each day?

Mike Hesson has already asked how those with suspect actions will be policed: what happens, he said, if a wicket falls off a ball delivered by an action in breach of the laws? Will a TV umpire review it immediately? Umpiring technology hardly needs further complication. As it stands, these discussions haven't begun but these are difficult and complicated questions. It is, after all, a difficult and complicated issue, even if it feels sometimes that cricket has still not grasped this.

The DRS problem: it's not the humans stupid

Kartikeya Date 

The controversial Trott decision: what many observers don't get is that it wasn't actually the third umpire who made the final call  © PA Photos

Enlarge

The DRS is a system in which umpiring decisions can be reviewed by players. Events on the field can also be reviewed by umpires in some circumstances before a decision is made. A widely held view about recent problems with the system is that while the DRS is fine, the way it is used by players, and on occasion by umpires, has caused difficulties.

I hold the view that the problem, if there is one, is with the system, not with the way it is used. The way the system is defined strictly determines the way it is used.

ALSO READ

Cricket and DRS - The Best is not the Enemy of the Good

Cricket, Physics and the Laws of Probability

Hawk-Eye is cockeyed, says Bishan Singh Bedi

 

The DRS system I refer to is described in detail by the ICC in its Playing Handbook (pdf). It is worth clearing up a few misconceptions at the outset.

The TV umpire does not overturn a decision under the DRS. The TV umpire is explicitly prohibited from discussing whether or not a particular appeal should result in an out or a not out. Further, there is no standard in the DRS requiring "conclusive evidence to the contrary" to overturn a decision, as many commentators are fond of telling us.

The rules make only three points. First, the TV umpire must limit himself to the facts. Second, if some of the evidence requested by the umpire on the field does not permit a conclusion with "a high degree of confidence", the TV umpire should convey to the umpire on the field that a conclusive answer is not possible (the conclusion in this case is not the decision itself but about individual points of fact potentially influencing it). Finally, if some information is not available to the TV umpire, he is required to report this to the on-field umpire. He is also required to provide all other evidence requested by the on-field umpire. If we go by the ICC's DRS rules, at no point in the review process is the TV umpire required to provide a definitive conclusion by putting together all the evidence.

The Guardian reported that the ICC did admit to a protocol error in the way the umpires addressed Australia's review in Jonathan Trott's first-ball lbw dismissal in the second innings at Trent Bridge. The ICC has declined to say what the protocol error was, citing a long-standing policy of not revealing communication between umpires. A number of observers think that the absence of one Hot Spot camera angle should have automatically meant that the outcome of the review should have been inconclusive, allowing Dar's original not-out decision to stand. I think this is a misreading of the ICC's DRS rules.

Let's reconstruct the case of Trott. Umpire Erasmus in the TV umpire's box would not be asked "Is Trott LBW?", or even "Did Trott hit the ball with the bat?" Going by the ICC's rules, he would be asked a different series of questions. Does Hot Spot show a touch? No. Does the replay show a touch?Inconclusive. No clear evidence of a deviation. (Some people have argued that there was evidence of deviation on the replay. I disagree. As did Michael Atherton on live commentary.) Does the square-of-the-wicket Hot Spot show a touch? This angle is unavailable. Can you hear any relevant sound on the stump microphone? Inconclusive. Did the ball pitch in line? Yes. Did it hit the pads in line? Yes. Does the ball-track predict that it would have hit the stumps?Yes.

According to the rules, Erasmus would be prevented from providing probabilities or maybes. It would have to be yes, no, or can't say. After getting all these factual responses from Erasmus, Dar would have to make up his mind. Did what he heard from Erasmus merit reversal? As we know, he decided that it did. The protocol error could have been that Erasmus neglected to mention that one of the Hot Spot angles was unavailable. It could also have been that Dar weighed all the facts Erasmus provided to him incorrectly and reached the wrong conclusion, though it is difficult to construe this last possibility as a protocol error, since the protocol explicitly requires the on-field umpire to exercise judgement, which is what Dar did. "The on-field umpire must then make his decision based on those factual questions that were answered by the third umpire, any other factual information offered by the third umpire and his recollection and opinion of the original incident" (See 3.3[k] of Appendix 2 of the Standard Test Match Playing Conditions, ICC Playing Handbook 2012-13).

This is the central faultline in the understanding of the DRS. To some technophiles, it promises an end to interpretation; that, with the DRS, there is to be no more "in the opinion of the umpire". Technology will show everything clearly - make every decision self-evident.

Not so. Under the DRS, a judgement has to be made about whether or not evidence is conclusive. A judgement also has to be made about whether all the evidence (often conflicting, due to the limitations of the technologies involved), taken together, merits a reversal. There have been instances where outside edges have been ruled to have occurred, though there was no heat signature on the bat.

The ICC has consistently insisted that the idea is not to render umpires obsolete. It is right, but in a convoluted way. What the DRS does is allow umpires a limited, strictly defined second look at an event. But it does so on the players' terms. Umpires are currently not allowed to review a decision after it has been made on the field. The "umpire review" element of the DRS takes place before the decision is made on the field in the first instance. Simon Taufel, who has wide experience of both DRS and non-DRS international matches, has questioned whether this is reasonable.

So far, the DRS has been badly burnt in the ongoing Ashes, and has received criticism from some unexpected quarters. Add to this a recent report that a few boards other than India's also oppose it. I suspect that the DRS will not survive in its present form for long.

The ICC is experimenting with real-time replays, which it says will allow TV umpires to initiate reviews. The ICC has long claimed that this is currently not done because it will waste time. The ICC's statistics suggest that in an average DRS Test match, 49 umpiring decisions are made (a decision is said to be made when an appeal from the fielding side is answered). Let's say an average Test lasts 12 sessions. This suggests that on average about four appeals are made per session of Test cricket when the DRS is employed. These numbers don't suggest that allowing umpires to initiate reviews will result in too much extra wasted time, do they? It should be kept in mind, though, that the ICC assesses time wasted relative to the progress of the game, and not simply as a measure in seconds or minutes.

The most damaging consequence of the DRS is off the field. It has now become a point of debate among professional observers of cricket about whether dismissals are determined by the umpire. The idea that the umpire is an expert whose role it is to exercise judgement, and whose judgement is to be respected, is now only superficially true. Time and again, eminently reasonable lbw decisions are reversed for fractions, and as a result are considered clear mistakes. Cricket has lost the ability to appreciate the close decision, the marginal event. It has lost the essential sporting capacity to concede that an event on the field is so close that perhaps a decision in favour of the opposition is reasonable.

On Cricket - Hawk-Eye is cockeyed, says Bishan Singh Bedi

Former Indian captain Bishan Singh Bedi, one of the finest left-arm spinners the world has seen, shared his views on contentious issues surrounding the game in an exclusive chat with TOI 26 July 2013. Excerpts...

The first two Ashes Tests have put a big question mark over the reliability of the Decision Review System. Are you for doing away with DRS?

Look, the whole idea behind allowing players to review umpiring decisions was to eliminate human errors with the help of technology. Nothing is wrong with that. The problem lies with the technology itself. I have never been a big fan of the Hawk-Eye and now it seems the Hot Spot too has gone cold. I completely endorse Ian Chappell's view that DRS should be taken out of the players' hands and handed over to the on-field umpires, who should be able to get technology-based inputs from the third umpire.

------------
Also Read

Cricket and DRS - The Best is not the Enemy of the Good

Cricket, Physics and the Laws of Probability

----------

But, as you said, the technology is still not foolproof...

It is not. There are inherent flaws in Hawk-Eye that in my opinion makes it cockeyed. What I particularly don't like about this technology is its standard approach to deviations. All bowlers know that very often balls deviate - more or less - without any particular reason. It may also depend on whether the bowler is bowling into the wind or against it. So these decisions are best left to on-field umpires, for they are in the best position to adjudicate.

Do you agree with the basic premise for a decision review in case of LBW appeals - that the ball should have pitched in line with the stumps?

The key to an LBW decision, in my opinion, should be not where the ball pitches but whether it would go on to hit the stumps if the batsman's did not come in the way. Let me point out that Mike Gatting would have been declared not out (on an LBW appeal) had Shane Warne's much-hyped 'Ball of the (last) Century' struck him on his back foot instead of sneaking in between his legs to hit the stumps! After all, Warne's big leg-break had pitched way outside the batsman's leg stump!

So how does one factor in the deviation?

It is a tough one. That is why I maintain that umpires should be very skeptical while ruling in bowlers' favour on front-foot LBW appeals. Look, the depth of the crease is four feet, and assuming that an average six-foot batsman would cover another four feet while playing forward means the ball would strike the pad some 8-9 feet from the stumps. The challenge before an umpire is that he not only has to read the line correctly but also factor in the trajectory of the delivery and possible deviations before deciding whether the ball would have gone on to hit the stumps.

So you are not in favour of umpires giving LBW decisions when batsmen are playing well forward?

Umpires should be more than 100% sure before upholding such appeals. All batsmen are not six-footers, so the umpires have to use their discretion.

Isn't it a pity that during your playing days batsmen got away by simply padding up?

Not only me, all four of us (Prasanna, Venkataraghavan and Chandrasekhar included) too missed out on a bagful of wickets because of this. Each one of us would have ended up with at least 200 more victims had umpires in our era given batsmen out when struck on the front pad.

Don't you think that umpires are under too much pressure because of DRS?

The umpire's job is an unenviable one. It is up to the governing body to make life easier for them. The players are not making it easier by appealing for everything. Umpires are human and are bound to succumb to pressures.

Why blame the players for this? They are, after all, playing within the rules...

The history of the game tells us that new rules had to be introduced because players pushed the parameters too far. 'Bodyline' bowling was possible because there was no restriction on the number of fielders on the leg side at that time. Fast bowlers used bouncers, a legitimate weapon in their armoury, to intimidate batsmen rather than trying to get them out. Ball-tampering became an issue. Match referees had to be introduced to make sure that there was no hanky-panky at the toss and to curb sledging. 

There seems to be a dearth of umpiring talent in the world...

You know why the English umpires used to be the best in our time? It was because they were mostly first-class cricketers for whom umpiring was a logical career option.

Is that the reason why it is not fair to compare players from different eras?

Just look at the bare facts. Together the four of us played 231 Tests, picked up 853 wickets but only 12.5 per cent of them (107) were LBW dismissals. Of my 266 Test wickets, only 16 came from LBWs (Prasanna 189/25, Venkataraghavan 156/24, Chandrasekhar 242/42). Muralitharan alone has 150 LBW victims, Shane Warne 138, Kumble 156, Vettori 74, Harbhajan 68 and Swann 68.

India's greatest cricket series - Recalling India's collective vow of silence

Akarsh Sharma

 |  | 7 COMMENTS

Trigger finger: SK Bansal gives Glenn McGrath out lbw on the last day of the 2001 Kolkata Test  © Getty Images

Enlarge

Dave Richardson, the ICC chief executive, has called for the debate on neutral umpires to be reopened. It is a logical step too, since the nations that produce the best officials are unfairly deprived of the highest standards in officiating.

Umpires, their decisions, the DRS, and general human competence in the face of technology - all have come under the scanner during the ongoing Ashes series.

 Also Read

Cricket and DRS - The Best is not the Enemy of the Good

Ah, the Ashes! The fourth sequel to the greatest series ever - a title that is vehemently contested in India.

The greatest series ever? Neutral umpires? Combine the two and it serves as a natural trigger to take our minds back to 2001, a year before the Elite Panel of ICC umpires was appointed.

It seems a good time then to - if sheepishly rather than fondly, for reasons that will become clear soon - reminisce about the actual greatest series everwhen free men stood against the immortals and, unlike in the Battle of the Hot Gates, miraculously won the combat of the dust bowls.

India isn't so much the land of snake charmers as it is the land of unrivalled cricket fanatics. Fanaticism by definition leads to voluntary blindness and mutism. And from late afternoon onwards on the first day of the famousLaxman-Dravid Test match at Eden Gardens, the symptoms manifested themselves across the nation.

Harbhajan Singh had just become the first Indian to bag a Test match hat-trick, in circumstances so dubious that had Dean Jones been commentating, he'd still be muttering about the injustice in his sleep.

But, fortunately for us, we had the honour of being enthralled by the late Tony Greig, an Englishman whose brand of commentary every Indian could relate to: full of infectious enthusiasm that often came in the way of the facts. Thus, a cricket-mad nation perpetually charged up on adrenaline was further enthused by Tony's awe-inspiring words, and hope of immediate retrospection was lost.

Ricky Ponting was caught plumb in front. Adam Gilchrist smashed a ball that pitched miles (cricket metric) outside leg stump into his pads, but was given out lbw. The swashbuckling wicketkeeper, who had bludgeoned the Indian bowling en route to a match-winning ton at faster than a run a ball in the previous Test, left with a rueful smile.

And finally, Shane Warne was adjudged out caught, though replays were at the very least inconclusive, if not favouring the batsman's claim of a bump ball (though Sadagoppan Ramesh's unbelievable catch alone deserved that wicket, or so we convinced ourselves).

It was probably the most fortuitous hat-trick ever, and we were probably well aware of it at the time. But did we really care? Not a single bit.

An inherent detestation of anything Australian had clouded our senses. The visitors had won a record 16 Tests in a row. They had humiliated India in Mumbai, home of the nation's favourite son. Mark Waugh's paltry spin had made a mockery of batsmen who were born to play spin. Matthew Hayden and Gilchrist's combined onslaught had made a mockery of turning pitches. Ajit Agarkar had made a mockery of himself. Again.

But the tipping point was when Michael Slater - upset at his appeal for a catch being overturned - got in the face of Rahul Dravid, a cricketer for whom Indian mothers would be prepared to go to war, with rolling pins for swords.

And so, there was little remorse about the way India were thrown a lifeline.

The next morning, in offices, in schools, at bus stands, in shared cabs, in autorickshaws, on the footpaths, on news channels, in newspapers, the discussions would revolve around those five minutes of earth-shattering cricket the previous day.

Those who did dare point out India's extremely good fortune were shushed and banished. The implied embargo was added alongside the traditional laws of our cricket culture, which include: No remark can be accepted against the actions of Sachin Tendulkar, even if he unnecessarily paddle-sweeps his way back to the pavilion. And a Pakistani cricketer's communication skills ought to be laughed at irrespective of their educational backgrounds, and independent of how mediocre our own players' English-speaking skills are.

You were to muse over the Test match only in a 2:98 ratio, where 2% of the time is to be spent acknowledging the timing of the hat-trick and 98% of it admiring the lengthy batting partnership that followed two days later. If you were to watch the feat again, it ought to be done in 30 seconds and without replays. You were tacitly prohibited from indulging yourself in the finer details.

Six on-field umpires were used in the three Test matches. The three neutral umpires were experienced ones: David Shepherd, Peter Willey and Rudi Koertzen. All three were selected to be on the Elite Panel a year later, though Willey chose not to take up the option.

The three home umpires are worth looking at. S Venkataraghavan, who was later chosen as the only Indian umpire on the Elite Panel, stood in his 43rd Test in Mumbai. Unsurprisingly, the match went without a glitch.

SK Bansal, who stood in only his sixth Test (and incidentally his last) in Kolkata, and AV Jayaprakash, who stood in his ninth in Chennai, were the other two home umpires. Bansal, in particular, presided over a host of controversial decisions, which included the series-changing hat-trick calls and some key rulings that triggered Australia's second-innings collapse.

The speed at which his decisions were made - as Glenn McGrath found out when batting bravely to save the match in the final hour - suggested they were more impulsive than considered. He was an Indian after all, and only the most hard-hearted of professionals wouldn't have been affected by the screams of 100,000 people.

Such key moments, when the series was completely turned on its head, had more than just divine intervention about them. They also had a very human helping hand - or rather, finger. But a nation awash with patriotism and a renewed sense of pride chose to overlook factors that could possibly dampen their most famous victory.

The greatest series ever? Maybe. One of the greatest endorsements of the need for neutral and qualified umpires? Definitely.

Cricket: Umpiring Decisions should be based on Facts not Opinions

Girish Menon

Should match officials base their decisions on facts or opinions? In football a referee is not required to declare a goal based purely on his opinion. However in cricket an umpire could end a batsman's tenure at the crease based on a conjecture of what would have been if the ball had not been illegally impeded by the batsman. Yes I refer to the LBW decision, an odd method of dismissing a batsman that relies entirely on the forecasting ability of the umpire or the more modern DRS technology.

In football if a defender stops the ball's progress towards the goal using his hands the referee does not have to adjudicate on what would have happened to the ball if the defender had not stopped it illegally. The errant footballer maybe punished with a red card and a penalty given to the opposite side but a goal is never declared. In other words at no time is a referee asked to base his decision on what would have been if the footballer had not stopped the ball with his hands.

A batsman illegally impeding a cricket ball is cricket's equivalent of a handball. However unlike football a cricket umpire can award a 'goal' to the opposing side for this 'foul' by the batsman. i.e. he can declare a batsman out lbw for illegally impeding the ball.

 It is this writer's opinion that all umpiring decisions should be based on facts and not opinions. The LBW decision, with or without DRS technology, can at best be only called an opinion or a value judgement. And the problem with opinions is that they may not be shared by everyone. Currently an LBW decision involves the human umpire or DRS to forecast what would have happened if the ball had not been illegally impeded. Since, 'forecasting is difficult, especially about the future' would cricket not be better off if it based its decisions on facts instead of opinions?

As for the 'cheat', the batsman who deliberately impedes a ball's progress illegally, one can find other methods of punishing him and his team. But declaring a 'goal' based on opinion should not be the way forward for a modern game.

Related Posts

1. Cricket, Physics and the Laws of Probability

2. Abolish the LBW - it has no place in the modern world