The Importance of being Elite

The quality of umpiring by the men in the Elite panel is getting worse by the day. The umpiring in the India-Australia test series was the worst that I have seen in recent times with about 30 odd bad decisions in the 4 test matches. Some of these decisions were horrendous to say the least. Unfortunately the blunders were not restricted to a single person and all the 4 umpires who officiated had their share of booboos. Ofcourse Steve Bucknor was the worst of the lot and was sent home, this was only because of the impact that his decisions had on the outcome of the Sydney test match. The umpiring errors in the other matches were considered to have evened out between the two sides and hence were not talked about in great detail.


The sad part is that it has not stopped there. We saw a horrendous decision from Rudi Koertzen in the second ODI of the CB series and that was not the first time we are seeing a blunder from this man. Ofcourse I completely agree that umpiring is a difficult job and mistakes are bound to happen at times. But it is the frequency of these mistakes and the sheer absurdity of the mistakes made that calls for an upheaval of the Elite Panel. If memory serves me right the ICC used to have a yardstick wherein the elite umpires were ones who got more than 95% decisions right or something like that. It is all right on paper but the ICC does not have any monitoring system whereby the umpires are continually monitored so that they maintain their level of performance.

Atleast this news release I read today seems to suggest that the ICC are realising the need to do something about it:

ICC to appoint selectors to choose umpires

Dubai: The International Cricket Council (ICC) is set to appoint a four-member selection panel for the appointment of umpires, it is learnt here. According to the highly placed sources in the ICC, the panel members will be named before March this year.

The new panel will be responsible for the nomination of the Elite Panel Umpires List. The panel will also hike the present number of umpires from ten to twelve.

Till now the appointment of the Elite Panel Umpires was governed by the ICC management. However, perhaps to avoid controversies surrounding them, the ICC may not be wishing to have repeats of Darrell Hair and Steve Bucknor incidents in future.

It was not known whether the postings of the new Elite Panel umpires and referees for the different series would be named by the new selectors or would be done by Doug Cowie, the 61-year-old ICC'manager for umpires. He was one of New Zealand's leading umpires.

The future of these two controversial umpires whose contracts expire in March this year also will rest with the new selection panel.

While it is welcome to note that there will now be selectors for the Elite umpires, the increase in the number of umpires from 10 to 12 is definitely not good enough. There are 10 test playing countries and one would think that atleast 20 top notch umpires wont be too difficult to find. With the amount of cricket being played there is too much load on these 10-12 umpires, which might actually be the underlying cause for the deteriorating quality of umpiring.

Lets hope that the focus in the coming matches will be on the players rather than the men in the white coats!!