Completely OT: Cricketing Referrals

[Huddy 0]

This referral systmem is the most ridiculous thing i have ever seen in my life. This test series has been bad enough without this being trialled completely cluelessley. The players, the umpires; noone seems to understand the system...the only coinsistent thing about the decisions is that they are inconsistent. How do you define ''conclusive evidence'' so that you can change a decision. This conclusive evidence has seen two lbw''s changed in the series when the initial decision was right.

It''s completely insane; please please scrap this ICC! If this continues i will be convinced the NCFC board is actually running world cricket in their spare time!

[Theres only one Ken Foggo 0]

[quote user="Huddy "]

This referral systmem is the most ridiculous thing i have ever seen in my life. This test series has been bad enough without this being trialled completely cluelessley. The players, the umpires; noone seems to understand the system...the only coinsistent thing about the decisions is that they are inconsistent. How do you define ''conclusive evidence'' so that you can change a decision. This conclusive evidence has seen two lbw''s changed in the series when the initial decision was right.

It''s completely insane; please please scrap this ICC! If this continues i will be convinced the NCFC board is actually running world cricket in their spare time!

[/quote] Yeah why not - we''ve blamed them for everything else! [:D]

[The Voice of the Thorpe Area 0]

The problem with the referrals is that cricket is not like football- it is a game with strong principles for respecting the umpire (principles that football left behind long ago). The Umpire''s decision is always final is what I was always taught. The referrals makes a complete mockery of the foundations of the game.

Unlike goal-line technology or replays to determine a hand-ball or not, many cricket decisions cannot be decided in a few seconds, if at all. And in the cases of the two ''caught behinds'' tonight- visual evidence is useless, but audio and common sense should have said that they actually got both decisions wrong- there was no noise on Cook''s bat but was given out, whilst Strauss quite clearly has an edgy noise on his shot, but is given not out.

The whole thing is a complete shambles, making a fairly moderate paced format of the game even slower.

[The ghost of Michael Theoklitos 0]

I 100% agree.

I haven''t seen much of the England v West Indies series, (quite fortunately looking at some of the score cards), so I haven''t seen the instances you mention above. I can only use the current Australia v South Africa series, and there have been a few quite bizarre referrals decisions.

The first one went for Australia, when Neil McKensie was given out caught behind gloving a ball down the leg side. He clearly didn''t touch it, referred it, but the video was "inconclusive", and he was given out. Why would you refer something off your glove, and waste a referral. You''d know if you gloved the ball or not!

The second one went against Australia with an LBW decision (I think it was against Mark Boucher), where hawk-eye judged the ball to be pitching outside the line of leg. I hate it how hawkeye makes that decisions. I don''t have a problem with the use of hawkeye plotting where the ball lands, but it should be the job of the umpire to judge if the ball has pitched inline or not, not a machine. To the naked eye, the ball looked inline, but because not half of the ball was inside the "tram tracks", he was given not out.

They''re trialling the use of hot-spot in the 2nd test, which I hope should fix this. I have no idea why they didn''t use it initially though.

I think they should get rid of it, and go back to umpires on the field. I agree with Voice of Thorpe above in that we''re going to loose some of the principals the game of cricket is build around. It also means umpires are being unfairly compared against the technology.

Alas, I think they''ll persevere with it though. The system will get better, as they get used to it, but I think that cricket is one game where the use of technology is not going to work.

[Webbo118 0]

The problem with the England v West Indies referrals was that no noise was being heard for the catches because they hadn''t turned the knobs to activate the sound. So whilst there appeared to be a noise initially, nothing was heard on the replays. It wasn''t till late in the day (4th) that this was pointed out and the knobs were then duly adjusted. In my opinion, players must be removed from the referral system, i.e. leave it to the umpires. Experience has shown with run-out decisions that they tend to refer most even when it is fairly obvious. Therefore, by behaving in the same way there is more likelihood of correct decisions being achieved which surely is the aim. 

[James Kent 0]

Clearly there are a few problems, but with the use of hotspot, microphone noise and video evidence there is no reason this can''t be a useful tool.

The problem seems to be that the decision still rests with the umpire. Surely the final decision should come from upstairs.