Manicaland denied home advantage for National League final

The Manicaland cricket-viewing public has been denied the chance of watching their team contest the league cup final this Sunday against Old Georgians as the game has been moved to the `neutral' venue of Harare Sports Club. With the political climate as it is in Harare the game is by no means guaranteed, but the fact that the administrators have denied the league champions their right of home advantage is unfortunate. In Harare it will be just another one man and a dog affair but in Mutare it's a community occasion - exactly what the ZCU is trying to promote.

This means there will be no cricket at Mutare Sports Club until the following weekend when the winter districts league starts.

With reports of disenfranchisement of Zimbabwean citizens seeking to vote in the presidential elections this week, it's interesting to note that when the Zimbabwe cricket team requested permission to vote during their tour of India, permission was denied. Players and officials might have expected a more sympathetic hearing considering the Zimbabwe president is patron of Zimbabwe cricket.

Satellite viewers of that series would have been surprised that Dave Houghton was not on the commentary team. Originally down to go, he turned down a lucrative contract by turning back at Harare airport, unwilling to leave his family alone during the elections. Houghton was also on the short list of candidates for the newly created panel of ICC referees. In the end he lost out to South Africa's Mike Procter - perhaps a beneficiary of South Africa's support for India over the Mike Denness affair. What was interesting about that panel was the exclusion of Test-founding nations Australia and England and the domination by the Far East bloc - the new 21st-century power-brokers.

The other ICC list recently unveiled was the eight-man full-time umpire panel - to be used for all future Test matches. Its make-up is frustratingly predictable and (barring Pakistan's omission) naively political. There are no new faces - the panel has been drawn exclusively from the old two-per-country ICC international panel. If you were not on the old panel - like Manicaland's Kevan Barbour - then you had no chance of being selected. Widespread opinion has it that Barbour is the best umpire in Zimbabwe. It appeared his only chance of selection to the old panel depended on an influential ZCU administrator voting himself off that (well-paid) panel.

It's accepted everywhere that umpires have a sell-by date and a few on this panel have reached theirs. The nature of the modern game sees umpires under continual pressure, scrutiny and unrealistic expectation. Few maintain high standards indefinitely and this ICC quick-fix plan is bound to fail.

David Shepherd was once the best - but his kindly image now produces shudders. In the recent Sydney test his failure to issue Brett Lee with a first and final warning for the 145-km beamer at Gary Kirsten meant that he could not later remove the bowler for a repeated offence. Younger fresher umpires tend to keep up with law changes. Shepherd and Venkataraghavan should rather be employed as ICC umpire talent scouts.