White Coat blues

To err is human but if you stumble time and again there has to be a marked deficiency in your judgment.

The appalling standards of umpiring in India's domestic cricket got another coat of varnish in the one-day game between India A and South Africa A at Rajkot.

India were 98/4 when Albie Morkel slipped in a short one to a fending Manoj Tiwary. The ball crashed his helmet and lobbed in the air before alighting on the keeper. The umpire, after conferencing with his partner at square-leg, held that the ball had grazed the bat. The replays though showed otherwise.

Sentenced to the pavilion, Tiwary's expression was unfailingly blank.

Sure enough the men in the devout white coat can not be faulted for one slip up. Besides, who can deny that the most stressful (and thankless) jobs in cricket are that of umpires and wicket-keepers? And needless to say that unlike us, umpires do not enjoy the benefit of technology.

Thought I had philosophised the crap out of it till I was asked to check this umpire's record in recent times. In the last Irani Trophy fixture, he declared Uttar Pradesh's Shalabh Srivastava and Jyoti Yadav out in his unique interpretation of the laws of leg-before.

Later that season, in a Ranji Trophy Super League game between Hyderabad and Bengal, he gave Tiwary LBW (wonder whether there is some karmic connection between the two), when the ball had clearly deviated off his inside edge.

Better wisdom seems to have prevailed this year. The Indian cricket board has asked K Hariharan and SK Tarapore to officiate the ongoing Irani Trophy game at Rajkot, knowing perhaps that a few careers hinge on this tie.

It may be unfair to lay all the bad press on one umpire when there are 10 others in the ranks who do not lack in incompetence. An upcoming seamer tells me that some Indian umpires have perfected a two-phrase vocabulary for all leg-before appeals: going down the leg side or the ball is too high - whatever flashes across their minds instinctively.

Players sulked, whined but their outcries were lost on the board. Consequently, no Indian found a place in the Emirates Elite Panel of the International Cricket Council's Umpires even after the panel was expanded from seven to 10.

A rather jolted BCCI, in a desperate move, pruned down the number of umpires on its Elite, All India and Ranji Trophy panel to 100.

In the past, the BCCI's 40 elite umpires were reviewed on their performance in the last five years. This season onwards, video recording along with reports by captains, coaches and match referee will be used to assess them.

There is a noticeable trend in the last two years: 90 per cent of the winning captains awarded higher grades to the umpire, while 60 per cent of the losing captains felt he was below par. The BCCI seems to have grown wise to the fact that the two captain's report can not be the only barometer to judge the white coat.

The board has several other plans; apparently, it has asked the director of umpires S Venkataraghavan to conduct refresher courses for his tribe. While all these ideas sound impressive on paper, nothing like drawing from the experiences of the best in the business. So why not get the likes of Simon Taufel on board for a few sessions?

When this writer asked Bomi Jamula (a retired umpire) what separates the good umpires from the rest, he pointed out three critical areas: confidence, getting into the right position after the ball is delivered and conviction in his decisions even though he must have made mistakes in the past.

He says that it is not known to many that Taufel has owned up to that strange decision at Trent Bridge when he raised the dreaded finger to Sachin Tendulkar although the ball was clearing missing the off-stick. Does that make Taufel any less worthy of admiration?

Perhaps it may not be a bad idea to have umpires' coaches to oversee a select few who could be groomed at the ICC level. Just small steps to meaningful Howzats.