Public defender turns prosecutor.

In January of this year, Dave Richardson, the ICC’s General Manager, responded to a rising wave of umpire bashing by writing an article for Cricinfo extolling the virtues of the ICC elite panel of umpires.

In his ‘These guys are good’ speech, Richardson claimed that there was no reason to believe there was a problem with umpiring at the highest level, and cited a number of impressive statistics to back up his argument.

It seems strange then that only a few months after Richardson’s defensive article that he should be behind an effort to see players have the right to challenge umpiring decisions, along the lines of the system used in American football, using replays to support the challenge.

Richardson is reported to be the author of a document due to be presented to the ICC next month advocating these significant changes to current umpiring practises.

In light of Richardson’s January article, one can only assume that there has either been a dramatic drop in umpiring standards since January, or more likely, that his earlier piece was written in somewhat of a knee jerk fashion to counter the criticism that was being increasingly levelled against several members of the elite panel.

Richardson’s January article personalised the umpiring process and consequently missed the real point of the argument. One suspects that was his intent. We all know that umpires are human, and we also are well aware that humans make mistakes. The point is, that quite clearly, the game today does not necessarily need to rely exclusively upon human judgement to arrive at umpiring decisions and Richardson would now seem to be agreeing with the need for (and indeed engineering the process of) change.

However the ICC has trialled new things before and the outcomes of these trials tends to be deafening silence wrapped around an innocuous return to the status quo.

The ICC’s Super Series experiment of using video replays has not seen the light of day since the trial, and yet we have not heard conclusively that the trial was deemed a failure.

This would seem to indicate that the ICC is woefully short of robust procedures to encompass its own experiments. The Super Series trial had such an aura of informality that it is hardly surprising nothing has changed since the toe dipping use of the video replay. In fact to conduct any experiment without a specific and measurable set of testing criteria is virtually guaranteeing a state of inertia following the trial. One must have a clear understanding of what success will look like in order to know when one has achieved it.

If Richardson’s u-turn on the need for umpiring review is well received by the ICC then we will no doubt see more gentle forays into the forest of experimentation. If and when this happens the ICC could do well from starting fist with a review of its procedures for conducting experiments.

For starters they could do worse than publicly announce what is deemed to be the likely outcomes from any trial and what the ramifications for the game would be dependant on these results. By doing this the ICC become accountable for a specific outcome before the experiment begins. Without a roadmap for change any tinkering with the game is likely to be once more relegated into the too hard basket never to be heard of again.

Richardson has changed his stance because the need for change in umpiring processes is as blatantly obvious to him as it has been to so many others for so very long. It is, quite frankly, becoming more and more ridiculous that the armchair viewer has access to replays and camera angles that are so often needed to fairly judge the legitimacy of an appeal, and yet are deprived viewing from the decision makers.

Whilst it is ironic, that the public defender of umpires is now the baton holder in the race for change, at least Richardson appears to be advocating sensible and realistic options for revision.

Whether anything will actually change though remains to be seen.