C M Jenkins: The Futility Of Trial By TV (05 Jan 1996)

The Electronic Telegraph Friday 5 January 1996

Futility of trial by TV is exposed by Thorpe exit delay

Christopher Martin-Jenkins analyses contentious rise of camera instrusion

IT was in South Africa that the genie of the third umpire was first conceived and then released into Test cricket at Durban in November 1992.

The point may still be debatable whether it was a good or an evil genie, but the events in the fifth South Africa-England Test at Cape Town yesterday afternoon assuredly suggest that more harm than good has come from the apparent logic of letting camera evidence decide, whenever it irrefutably can, whether or not a batsman was out.

That justice was done when Graham Thorpe was finally given run out is only part of the argument. After all, the very cameras which proved him out of his ground had also proved that the ball had not hit Robin Smith`s glove and later suggested that the ball which got Graeme Hick would have missed his leg stump.

Does one justice make up for other injustices, or would it be better to leave all decisions either to the umpires in the middle as of old, or exclusively to an umpire ruling on the evidence of slow motion replay?

That is an appalling thought, surely, not least because 99.9 per cent of cricket matches are not televised anyway. Yet Thorpe`s dismissal was a further step on the road to the takeover of the game by television.

It is television money which pays the bulk of players` salaries and for world-wide ground improvements, either directly or indirectly through the sponsorship, which would be so much less lavish without the cameras.

Television increasingly dictates the conduct of the game by dissecting every nuance of every ball bowled, influences the laws and makes umpires lives incomparably more difficult by expecting perfection where perfection is impossible. Since 1992 it has even abrogated some of their decisions.

Few came out of this with credit

All this is not to say that television does not do compensating wonders for the game by promoting it as no other medium can, but that is not now the point. It was not the umpire who gave Thorpe out yesterday: on the contrary he initially gave him not out which, pre 1992, would have been the end of the matter.

The real arbiters, in chronological order, were the television commentators, who instantly replayed the incident; the crowd in the chalet boxes which nestled close to the scoreboard on the mountain side of the ground, who saw the camera`s verdict and reacted angrily; the South Arican captain Hansie Cronje, who appealed again, first to umpire Orchard, then to Thorpe.

The sequence continued with the same umpire Orchard, who walked across to seek help from his more experienced colleague from Australia, Steve Randell; the aforementioned Randell, who advised his partner to call for another verdict; and finally the third umpire Karl Liebenberg, who had known all along that the throw by Andrew Hudson from fine-leg had hit the stumps before Thorpe had regained his ground.

Few came out of this with credit. Cronje had no right to dispute the original verdict, however understandable his behaviour might have been in view of the crowd`s reaction.

The umpire`s decision is final, states Law 27, although it adds that, provided he does so promptly, he may alter his decision.

The law only allows a second appeal to the umpire who has not made the original decision, in this case to Randell, although it was to Orchard that Cronje spoke in what amounted to an attempt (and a successful one) to take the law into his own hands.

The captains have a special responsibility to "ensure that the game is conducted within the spirit of the game as well as within the laws".

Cronje was bound by regulation number 2f of the latest ICC regulations respecting conduct and the duties of the third umpire: "The on-field umpire has the direction (sic) whether to call for a TV replay or not and should take a common sense approach."

The regulation continues: "Players may not appeal to the umpire to use the replay system. A breach of this provision would constitute dissent and the player could be liable for discipline under the code of conduct."

If Cronje was not aware of this, he should have been. Clive Lloyd had no option but to fine him, and Cronje was lucky not to be suspended as well.

It is unlikely that he did not know that Brian Lara had been suspended for one match by the referee, Raman Subba Row, in 1994, for calling for a replay during a one-day international in India.

Or indeed that his opposite number, Mike Atherton, had resisted appealing to the umpire Darrell Hair in Australia last winter after Hair had failed wrongly, twice, to call for a replay.

In both cases the batsmen would have been given out by the television verdict. Atherton played by the rules, and England won neither match.

Cronje did not play by the rules, and South Africa went on to win. He may feel that the huge prize justified his action, but that way anarchy lies and immorality rules.

Source :: Electronic Telegraph (http: www.telegraph.co.uk)