Sunday, August 24, 2008

That's why we need referrals

"Excuse me?" exclaims Homer's blog, detailing the double standards evident in two ICC match referees' interpretations of offensive behaviour by players. While Aleem Dar let Flintoff go scot-free in an SA-England match, Chris Broad slapped Munaf Patel with a level 2 offence for a far lesser misdemeanour in the second ODI between India and Sri Lanka. Broad's harshness also rekindles the white-man-not-taking-the-brown-man's-word argument that snowballed into a crisis after the Sydney Test when Mike Proctor banned Harbhajan Singh. So, when I saw pictures of a Cuban taekwondo fighter kicking a match referee in the face after some dubious decisions at the Olympics on Saturday, I thought it isn't far-fetched to expect a similar incident in cricket one of these days if the ICC persists with arming undeserving people like Broad with so much power. And yet, there's an easy way to prevent such ugliness, and this was evident in the Test series. I mean the referral system, of course, which defuses all the rancour in the middle, just like it did for tennis. More on this in an article I wrote, titled Back to the middle ages, because that's what it feels like to watch cricket again without the referral system which has been put on the back-burner after its trial in the Tests.

5 comments:

Viswanathan said...

I agree with you Sumit. This is where the proposal to broadcast conversations between umpires will come in handy. Remember in this case it was the umpires who charged Munaf.

On a less serious note, does Munaf know English ?

Anil Singh said...

Good post Sumit.
I agree with Ottayan.It may seem funny, but the problem of biased treatment towards teams from the Indian Sub-continent, aggravates as there exists a language barrier. Unlike Indians, Pakistanis or Sri Lankans(sorry, include Bangladeshis as well), who use expletives from the same pool; and understand and speak English with functional accuracy, the people from English speaking nations are totally ignorant of the languages of the Indian Sub-continent.
As a result an expletive with the same potency and objective, when spoken in any of the Indian sub-continental languages, invites far greater penalty than its English counterpart.

When players from our part, try to remove this anomaly, and use English profanities, they are penalized even more severely; for a one simple reason, how dare they use something, which is not theirs.

This is my first visit to your blog and I found it quite absorbing.I'll look forward to new write-ups from you more often.

Unknown said...

yes otttayan, more transparency the better

Unknown said...

welcome, bisht. i just think any system that smoothens out these frictions should be promoted.

Anil Singh said...

You're right Sumit.On one should hesitate to try new things;the key is to smoothen the rough edges, when nee arises.