By Tony Becca - On The Boundary CASTRIES:
THE game of cricket is filled with bad umpiring decisions, they are part of the game, and over time the players have come to accept them on the reasoning that umpires, being human, can and will make mistakes and that in a career they balance themselves out. Sometimes they go against them but sometimes they are in their favour.
As the West Indies and India prepare for the third Test of the five-match Cable & Wireless Series, however, the players, on both sides, are hoping that the number of mistakes will be less, much less, than it was in the first two Tests.
The word coming out of both camps is that the players, particularly the batsmen, are disturbed at the number of bad decisions - so much so that they believe that the difference between success and failure is not dependent on their skill or that of the bowlers but instead on the umpires, and based on what has happened so far, it appears they are right.
Without even going to the traditionally contentious leg before wicket decisions - and there have been many dubious ones, given and not given, so far in the series, there have been some decisions so obviously wrong that the skill of Australian Daryl Harper and Sri Lankan Ashoka de Silva, a former Test player, deserves to be questioned.
In the first Test match at Bourda, for example, Brian Lara was ruled out caught for zero by the wicketkeeper off pacer Javagal Srinath when the bat was far from the ball, and with one wicket to go in the second Test at Port of Spain, Shivnarine Chanderpaul, on 64, was ruled not when he edged Srinath to the wicketkeeper.
Fortunately for the umpire who had referred the decision to the third umpire, that decision did not affect the result of the match.
The umpires' job is not easy, and it is even more difficult these days with television cameras and slow motion replays exposing every mistake.
Even without the benefit of television, however, some of the mistakes have been so glaring that is easy to sympathise with those who have been victims of bad decisions - particularly the batsmen who have no second chance.
When a bowler is denied a wicket by a bad decision, there is the consolation, for whatever it is worth, that he can come back, with the following delivery or whenever, and get a wicket, probably many more.
There is no such consolation, however, for the batsman who is given out when he is not out. When the batsman is out, he has no second chance - not until the second innings or the following match.
Will it be better at Kensington Oval?
Hopefully it will be. But for those decisions that went against them, the West Indies may have won the Test match, and because of those that went against them, India may have lost it.
The only good thing about what has happened so far is that even if India were on the losing end and wanted to, they cannot blame it on hometown umpires or on the presence of inexperienced umpires.
Neither Harper nor de Silva is a West Indian, and according to the International Cricket Council that selected them, they are among the best in the world - the very best.
The ICC has put together a panel of eight umpires who will officiate in Test matches around the world, they are the elite, and Harper and de Silva are two of them.
