Arthur Crabtree wrote:I was against extending DRS to include keeping your referral if the tech came back umpire's choice, because it validated the captain talking a punt on a marginal decision, rather than a howler. But given that change, the captains don't really have any justification for complaint. Just stop using DRS in the hope of a freebee.
Punishing an appealing side for getting a decision right makes absolutely zero sense, the distinction between "howler" and "not out" has been totally eradicated by technology, there is zero justification for separating the two as long as the given result falls in the margin of error of the technology. The only results the system should spit out are "out", "not out" or in 0.0001 percent of decisions when the ball is missing or hitting by fractions of a mm, a "null" decision which rests on field. A bowler who appeals on DRS for an umpires call hit has judged the call 100% correctly, it is the umpire that has made the mistake. Why cricket insists on protecting the original decision makes no sense, doubly punishing the fielding team for that mistake was psychopathic.
With that in mind, a captain should be rights be able to look at an incident and challenge anything he thinks is over 50% out with confidence. Asking captains to have impeccable judgement when umpires themselves make errors in abundance seems a dubious split of responsibilities...... Wilson has made countless disastrous calls, but Paine deserves to lose the match because with a couple of runs left he made a single bad call which might have been motivated by a hint of desperation? Is this the type of system that sounds like its bringing equitable relief to the sport?
Its worth noting that nothing happens in a vacuum. For every umpire mistake, and there have been plenty go against Australia in a short space of time, the mindset of a captain changes. You say Paine has no justification for complaint, but how would you feel if you kept on trusting the judgement of the umpire, only to find in the first test at least, he was wrong about 20 times? You are wrong twice in a series and you lose a test and the Ashes on that? Every mistake makes you more convinced you could be right. Paine was probably left thinking "you know what, they need two runs and the umpire has been wrong about everything, maybe he's got this one wrong again".
We can pretend that technology is there for a whole host of reasons, but the true one is to make sure that the right decisions are made. And yet, we are still getting too many decisions wrong when a tool exists that can solve the issue. This is crazy. Either use the technology to its potential, or dont use it. This hybrid nonsense of "a decision must be a terrible one, not just wrong" mixed with "but it can be terrible too if the captain makes a couple of wrong ones before" seems to solve nothing. It just leaves those errors that slip the net fill the space that more errors used to occupy, and it feels worse.
Its worth remembering a lot of occasions, there are no umpires call errors either;lots of feather edges, bats hitting ground or flicking pads producing noises, or whose balls that hit pad and bat around the same instance which all look out to the naked eye until you slow them down. Gloved chances down the leg side, bat pad catches..... alot of umpiring mistakes come from these because the margins are tiny, they can look out a lot of the time.