Like all other sports officials, cricket umpires have to make many decisions on which the outcome of a game may hinge. The crucial decisions are nearly all those to do with whether a batsman is out or not. In televised matches, each decision is minutely scrutinised, and journalists and players do not hesitate to criticise the faulty ones. This puts the poor umpire under huge pressure.
One recent development has been the use of a "3rd umpire", who uses video to make a decision when the umpire on the field is in doubt. Not everyone agrees that video umpires are a good thing. They can't be applied to all decisions, and they slow down the game. They can only be used in top-level games, contravening the principle that a good game is one that can be played satisfactorily at all levels with the same equipment. As more and more decisions are referred to the video umpire, the status of the umpires on the field declines from being arbiters of everything to being mere ball-counters and cloakroom attendants. And it's only a game, dammit.
Here is a suggestion for a small modification to the laws of cricket that would put the on-field umpires back in charge, relieve much of the pressure on them, and, as a bonus, settle another thorny issue in the game - whether batsmen should "walk" or not (see later).
I will use decisions about catches as my example. However, what I say applies equally to LBW, run-outs, stumpings and so on.
The current situation
At the moment the law is framed in terms of physical events: a batsman is out if the ball touches their bat (or the hand holding it) and is then caught by a fielder before it bounces. The law states that the umpire is the sole judge of these events. However, human senses and brains are imperfect, so an umpire's perception of events will never correspond exactly to reality. Sometimes it will depart so far from reality that the umpire will say that the batsman is out when he isn't, or vice versa. So, the current situation is that the umpire's role is as the imperfect judge of the physical events in terms of which the law is phrased. An umpire's decision can be wrong.
A better philosophy of umpires' decisions
My suggestion is simple. Although the law is framed in terms of physical events, actual decisions are based, de facto, on events within the umpire's brain. This being the case, it makes sense to re-write the law in terms of events within the umpire's brain. Thus, the law might read:
A batsmen is out "caught" if the sequence of physical events, whatever it may actually be, is such as to give the impression to the umpire that the ball has struck the bat and has been caught by a fielder before it bounces.
Notice two things:
- Exactly same decisions will be made with the new law as with the old. The course of games will not be altered one bit. No decisions made under the old law would be made differently under the new one.
- However, it is now logically impossible for the umpire to make an incorrect decision. Pressure is taken off umpires, and all the trouble and expense of video umpires is eliminated.
- And that's not all...
To walk or not to walk?
What does a batsman do if they know that they have touched the ball and been caught, but the umpire gives them "not out"? Some people say that the batsman should "walk" - that is, give themself out and head for the pavilion. Others say that the batsman should take every umpire's decision as it comes, never "walking", but also departing without dissent when they have been wrongly given "out". It is possible to make a consistent argument for either position.
With the new version of the laws, all of this argument vanishes. Only one position is now valid: batsmen should never "walk". A batsman may feel the ball brush the edge of their bat on its way to the wicket-keeper's gloves, but if the umpire perceives otherwise, it is not a mistake - the batsman is purely and simply not out under the law.
The opposition
I have to confess that no-one I've spoken to thinks that this is a good proposal. There seem to be two counterarguments. The first is somewhat vague - that there's something a bit airy-fairy about casting the law in terms of events in someone's brain rather than what actually happened to balls and bats. I might agree with this argument if my proposal actually changed the decisions that umpires make, but it doesn't - the only things that change are the newspaper reports and the mental health of umpires.
The second counterargument is more substantial. Under my proposal, even an umpire with spectacularly deficient vision could never make an incorrect decision. Likewise, a corrupt umpire would have a field day (so to speak). Yet quite clearly, we do only want to employ umpires whose decisions are generally "accurate" in the sense that they reflect what actually happened. My proposal is quite consistent with maintaining high umpiring standards. At the beginning of any match, we appoint an umpire (two actually), and by doing so we define their decisions to be correct for that match. That's not to stop us (say, at the end of the season) later reviewing their decisions en masse and offering training (or unemployment) if the decisions appear to consistently misrepresent what actually happened. Again, this is roughly what actually happens at the moment. Players (usually) accept the umpire's decision as it comes, but at the end of the game, the captains report on the standard of umpiring. All I'm doing is changing the way we regard the individual decisions.