Wednesday, August 23, 2006
It's just not cricket
The Fourth Test ended disastrously and everybody seems to be blaming the umpires. I'm going to stick up for them.
Fact: in the context of a cricket match, the umpire is always right. They may, in reality, get things wrong, and matches have turned on wrong decisions, but it is almost unprecedented for them to be questioned on the field of play.
Fact: in the umpires' opinion the ball was tampered with. They duly applied the correct penalty.
Fact: the Pakistan team failed to turn out for the last session on Sunday. The umpires duly applied the correct penalty.
Fact: the ball was inspected at the fall of the last wicket (and was OK then) and again five overs later. Nobody is in a position to judged what damage had been done to the ball except those people who handled the ball in that period.
The Pakistan team threw a strop like spoilt children and the umpires did their job. Why is everybody coming down on the side of the team? It was them that ruined the match; if they had behaved like mature adults they would have played on, beaten England and registered a protest afterwards. As t is, instead of being up on a charge of ball tampering (of which they might be innocent, if the umpires were mistaken), they are now up for bringing the game into disrepute, a charge of which they are certainly guilty.
As I travelled home on the train tonight, a party of three people turned up looking for their reserved seats. They has 13 forwards and backwards and 14 forwards. Unfortunately, the carriage had a different layout to that assumed by the reservation system and seats 13 and 14 were "airline style" i.e. there was no 13 backwards, so there were only two seats for three reservations.
Whoever puts the little reserved tickets in the seat backs had noticed the problem and put 13 backwards and 13 forwards in the same seat back. What on earth made them think it would be OK to allocate the same seat to two reservations?
Fact: in the context of a cricket match, the umpire is always right. They may, in reality, get things wrong, and matches have turned on wrong decisions, but it is almost unprecedented for them to be questioned on the field of play.
Fact: in the umpires' opinion the ball was tampered with. They duly applied the correct penalty.
Fact: the Pakistan team failed to turn out for the last session on Sunday. The umpires duly applied the correct penalty.
Fact: the ball was inspected at the fall of the last wicket (and was OK then) and again five overs later. Nobody is in a position to judged what damage had been done to the ball except those people who handled the ball in that period.
The Pakistan team threw a strop like spoilt children and the umpires did their job. Why is everybody coming down on the side of the team? It was them that ruined the match; if they had behaved like mature adults they would have played on, beaten England and registered a protest afterwards. As t is, instead of being up on a charge of ball tampering (of which they might be innocent, if the umpires were mistaken), they are now up for bringing the game into disrepute, a charge of which they are certainly guilty.
It's just not common sense
As I travelled home on the train tonight, a party of three people turned up looking for their reserved seats. They has 13 forwards and backwards and 14 forwards. Unfortunately, the carriage had a different layout to that assumed by the reservation system and seats 13 and 14 were "airline style" i.e. there was no 13 backwards, so there were only two seats for three reservations.
Whoever puts the little reserved tickets in the seat backs had noticed the problem and put 13 backwards and 13 forwards in the same seat back. What on earth made them think it would be OK to allocate the same seat to two reservations?
# posted by JeremyP : 12:34 am
