ICC proposes appeals against umpire

While I was away the International Cricket Circus Council Executive Clown Officer Malcolm Speed announced that they'd be toying with the sanctity of umpiring experimenting with technology in umpiring, again. The ICC Cricket Committee voted 6-4 in favor of an appeals system that will allow each team three appeals to the third umpire per innings. If an appeal is successful the team will retain the right to three appeals but if not, then it is lost.

This latest ‘experiment’ should change the face of the game as we know it. Gone are the days when you could revel in a sense of moral superiority by telling your football loving sibling/pal etc. about how supposedly the whole difference between cricket and football and indeed any sport in the world was that you could not argue against the verdict of the umpire no matter what.

Like destiny you just had to accept their verdicts and move on, so much so that the ICC’s very own much raved about Code of Conduct guards against players showing dissent at an umpire’s decision. But now, thanks to the wonderful ICC, instead of that, we can look forward to explaining to our friends how teams will have the right to question every decision it feels it is being hard done by, that is, if we manage to understand this new ruling our selves first.

Apparently, I’m not the only one who is some what confused. But assuming that other more intelligent folks like Jag and Geoff for instance have interpreted this correctly you could have a grand total of no less then 26 appeals per match and assuming each would take a minimum of 1 minute you can be rest assured this new adventure will be perfectly non-time consuming.

If there’s any positive you can take out of this development it’s the fact that the executive board of the ICC is yet to approve the recommendations made by its cricket committee. So we might still see the back of this, but if, god forbid, the executive boards do approve this then we would have a trial at the Champions Trophy in October. And worse still if following the trial at the CT the powers to be some how come to the conclusion that this can work then we’d have to bear the ignominy of tolerating this madness at the World Cup!

But apart from the fact that this new adventure will give teams the perfect excuse to continue to think nothing of the ICC Champions Trophy but a money making, ridiculous new rule test experimenting ground, and that it would give them further incentive to continue with the ridiculously poor over rates we routinely see them accomplishing and the fact that this more or less completely undermines the role of the on field umpire, this new rule, as Inzi would insist, is noting short of perfect. For once I’m going to have to agree with Javed Miandad.