T N Ninan: Russian roulette

WEEKEND RUMINATIONS

Cricket is the only game where 70,000 spectators and millions of TV viewers can watch replays on and off the field, and see how the umpire has made a mistake "" but not allow the affected player or team to appeal against the wrong decision to a higher authority. It will allow the man generally considered the world's best umpire to admit that he felt terrible when he realised that he had wrongly given the world's best batsman out in the 90s, but not allow the batsman to appeal on the spot. It does not see the credibility gap when people can see what has happened but you continue to insist that "the umpire is always right" "" a rule being enforced now with severe penalties on any player who shows dissent, like nodding his head (footballers get away with much worse). All this was understandable when the umpire was standing at the stumps and the audience was 75 yards away and in no position to know better, while the players themselves could be partisan or too caught up in the action or stuck in the outfield. Technology has changed all this, but the cricket authorities are blind.

This is reminiscent of another tradition-bound sport, tennis "" also known for players being asked to show up in white and to observe a certain decorum in conduct, for calling it at one stage a "gentleman's" game (as different from that played by paid professionals), and so on. In tennis, like cricket, the outcome of a closely-fought contest lasting a few hours can boil down to a few key points; a single wrong call on one of them would make the wrong player the winner. But tennis has changed "" it now allows a player to appeal against the chair umpire's verdict, and uses technology to decide whether a ball travelling at 100 miles an hour was one centimetre on the line or missed it completely. It is the obvious thing to do, and the tennis authorities have done it.

This would not be vital for the game of cricket if the mistakes were few and mostly inconsequential "" reflected in the attitude that says that it all washes out pretty evenly in the end. But, on the evidence of umpiring in the games that India has played all of the last summer and this winter, it seems a fair bet that almost every one-day international, and many Test matches, have their outcomes influenced fundamentally by an umpiring error or two. Check the record of which players got the short end of the stick, and what happened to the match, and this will become clear. At the Sydney Test now under way, it is not hard to imagine the two teams' fortunes if Ponting had been given out at 17 and Symonds at 30; Australia might have been all out for 200 runs less than they scored. In other words, the game is being played like a version of Russian roulette "" you don't know when a gun will suddenly fire a bullet at you.

This is absurd because it is completely unnecessary and can be easily changed. All that is required is for the rules of the game to be modified, and to allow a team two appeals per innings against wrong umpiring decisions. The third umpire would take a few minutes in each case to give a verdict, and the contest would become a true exercise once again. Teams and players would not then feel victimised by particular umpires, the umpires themselves would feel relieved that their errors had not affected the course of a match, and the inglorious uncertainties of the game would be banished.