After the Lord’s Test you have to hand it to Ricky Ponting and the boys in the Baggy Greens — they have a sense of sportsmanship that is pretty much fair dinkum. As Adam Gilchrist explains in his brilliant autobiography, True Colours, the Aussie sporting psyche takes its lead from the school playing field. That means sledging is good sport, but sending on a physio for no reason other than to let the clock tick round is just embarrassing. So all those who took pot shots at Ponting for claiming the moral high ground after the Cardiff Test can just look again at the way Punter refused to be drawn into griping about dodgy dismissals, though Lord knows he had reason to gripe. Phil Hughes was caught by Andrew Strauss, but the TV replays showed the ball didn’t carry (and at ground level like that the slip catcher should know if he hadn’t taken it cleanly — the lack of intense finger pain would be a dead give-away). Flintoff had Katich caught, only it was off a no-ball, and not just a marginal one at that — Freddie’s front foot was practically on its way to Swiss Cottage. Hussey edged one to Collingwood, only ball hadn’t gone near bat — it had simply turned like a firecracker.
So it’s bizarre that two teams who were fine with the idea of playing Tests under floodlights decided not to allow players to refer to the TV umpire in this series. Here’s looking forward to October when the ICC lets players ask for TV referrals again, much as England and the West Indies did in the winter. OK, so the umpires seemed a bit befuddled at times, but then they probably haven’t mastered the red button either yet.
It’s difficult to see what cricket has to lose. For starters, you can’t get worked up about replays slowing down the game — this is a sport that stops for cake. Besides, a good replay gets the juices flowing. When Ugo Monye went crashing down the left wing at the start of the first Lions Test, the swing from elation to sheer dumbstruck awe at Jean de Villers’s brilliant defence was palpable, as, pint in hand, people in pubs from Pinner to Peebles stared dumbfounded, and tried to work out how on earth he’d got his arm between the ball and the turf. And at Wimbledon, referrals to Hawk-Eye gave us a window into the mind of the ice-cool Roger Federer — it turned out to be the one area of the modern game at which he was utterly useless, with a series of hopeless challenges when the ball was clearly out to anyone with eyesight slightly better than Arsène Wenger’s when Arsenal commit a foul.
It’s such a pity that the umpires can’t make fuller use of Hawk-Eye to judge lbw decisions — the simulation has to stop when the ball hits the pads, as the rest is deemed to be too speculative (albeit a more scientific speculation than Rudi Koertzen’s hunch). Come the next Ashes, there are bound to be instances like Ponting’s dismissal in the first innings at Lord’s. Given out caught off Anderson, he knew he hadn’t touched the ball, so would have referred it to the man with the screen. The third umpire would have confirmed he didn’t touch it. But third umpires won’t have the full benefit of Hawk-Eye, which showed he was out lbw anyway. Still, you wouldn’t want umpiring decisions to be clean-cut all the time, would you? If cricket teaches anything truly worthwhile, it’s how to walk back to the dressing room even when you know you didn’t edge one, or that the catch didn’t carry and, like a true gentleman, suppress that rage just long enough to get behind closed doors and beat seven bells out of your kit bag.
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