The flaw's the charm

The role of technology in umpiring has increasingly come under the spotlight in recent times. In the article below, which appeared in the February issue of Wisden Asia Cricket, Dileep Premachandran argues that technology detracts from the charm of the game.

Click here for Amit Varma's counter-argument.

The human element in umpiring: beauty with a few scars © Wisden Cricinfo Enlarge

Sporting beauty has innumerable facets, but for many of us its greatest attraction lies in the potential for romance. At some point in our ordinary existence, we have played the perfect cover-drive, holed the 25-foot uphill putt, or performed a step-over that left opposition defenders with twisted blood. For that infinitesimal moment, we were Garfield Sobers, Jack Nicklaus or George Best, with the world our oyster and dreams safely cosseted away from cold reality.

And from the time we could kick a ball about or grip a bat, we could argue like the best of our heroes. Anyone who ever played cricket with stumps chalked on a playground wall could tell you that rants and raves were never far away. Those who couldn't argue persuasively took the coward's way out, skulking home with bat, ball or stumps while the rest jeered. Leg-before decisions were a parallel universe, and each time the ball thudded into the shin, someone over-eager for a bat would raise the finger. If you were at the receiving end, you whined but it didn't stop you coming back for more the next day - motivated by romance's greatest ally, hope.

That was the reason most of us went out to play in the first place. If you were the school dunce, you could never dream of perfect marks, but on the field, even the most hopeless case could edge the boundary that won a match for his team. Nothing was black-and-white, and we found beauty in the many hues of grey.

And then you got technology. Suddenly, little beeps started to indicate faults in tennis, and in due course, people needed to stare at slow-motion replays to see if a batsman was short of his crease. Batsmen, who used to nonchalantly stroll about the crease after getting the faintest nick through to the keeper, were found out by ingenious little devices like the snick-o-meter. Heck, they even took the uncertainty out of the lbw - sport's equivalent of Russian roulette - by inventing an elaborate tracking system called Hawk-Eye.

Where, and how, will it end? Tennis has already become an apology of a spectator sport, with space-age-alloy-racquet-wielding steroid-boosted behemoths belting out serves that no one can see. The beeps tell you if it was in or out. And with the average player possessing the charisma of a dead halibut, you yearn for John McEnroe's line-call related tantrums, though you know he was way out of whack half the time.

If technology had been fashionable back in 1987, Sunil Gavaskar might have finished his final Test a winner. Instead, he was given out caught off the arm-guard when on 96, as India fell 16 agonising runs short of a famous victory. The cynic will tell you that he had been given a life by the umpires earlier, but we don't care either way. We savour that innings because it ended the way it did, because it gave us an excuse to shed tears as a once-in-a-lifetime hero walked off the park for the last time.

One of the greatest rivalries in sport, England-Germany in football, is based primarily on a goal that never was, a goal that proved decisive in the 1966 World Cup final. And not a season goes by without some team or the other claiming that they were cheated out of a title by some dubious offside goal.

When we walked home after our childhood games, we didn't so much talk victory and defeat as complain about how someone or the other had been sold down the river. Contentious decisions were our bones to chew on, and they didn't come any meatier than the lbw. If Hawk-Eye had been in existence, some of those 36-all-out totals would have been even more embarrassing.

Cricket's splendour lies in the fact that while the best team on the day always prevails - that doesn't happen in football or hockey, where a fluke goal can win a game - there is still plenty of opportunity to bemoan your fate: the no-ball that wasn't called, the inner edge that kissed the stumps without toppling the bails, or the leg-before that the umpire haughtily turned away. Regardless of whether you're Sachin Tendulkar or IM Pathetic, we've all been at the receiving end of what we've perceived, rightly or wrongly, as daylight robbery.

But it's not as though match officials haven't made us smile down the years. We loved Dickie Bird's quirks and his sentimentality, just as we love Pierluigi Collina's shining pate and Martian eyes. The day you bring in machines, and eliminate human error - bat-pad catches wrongly given, legal goal disallowed - what would we talk about? "We wuz robbed" is every fan's favourite theme. Take away the mistakes, and you might conceivably get perfect decisions ... and no one to talk about them. We'll take our beauty with a few scars.

Dileep Premachandran is assistant editor of Wisden Cricinfo.

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