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Umpiring System

© Ahmad Nawaz

Over the past few years, we have seen many poor umpiring decisions cause a loss to the team. In the World Cup, the lbw decision of Thorpe, Tendulkar's decision of lbw in Australia India Test Series, the wrong decision of Langer against Pakistan in test series of Pakistan and Australia and this continues.

All this has raised some concerns in the cricketing arena and really there is a need of more comprehensive umpiring system so as to avoid such incidents in future. No doubt, cricket is a game of human elements and any one can make mistakes or wrong decisions but measures should be taken in order to decrease the rate of these mistakes.

Developing a new umpiring system all together is a very difficult job to do but in a cricket match umpiring decisions carry the most importance and there is more and more need of getting accurate decisions.

The very first priority would be to get neutral umpires not only in an important match but also in all other matches because this problem has been discussed a lot and in recent times home team had got some advantage out of it.

There is a need of developing a point system for umpires. Let these points be the grades of the umpires. Umpires should be assigned the matches according to these points. An important match must have umpires with greater points. A new problem arises that

How these points should be awarded to the umpires:

It does need a big setup and a big monitoring system from ICC, which should be helped by the local cricket bodies. Every umpire get some points on a good decision and his points are deducted if he makes a poor or controversial decision or he simply does not give the batsman, the benefit of doubt. Another problem rises here that

Who will monitor all these decisions:

Match referees should be given this responsibility of monitoring the umpires decisions and thus the points are awarded to the umpires accordingly.

Umpires match fee:

In order to extract very best from the umpires, the payment to the umpires should be based on their points and off course their seniority in the umpires panel.

This is just a demo of what I have in my mind and I would like to discuss with the other people and higher cricketing authorities. I strogly think that by taking such measures more excitement, thrill and "purity" can be added to the gentlemen game, cricket.