New Delhi, Sep 3 (Inditop.com) Former International umpire Peter Willey believes that umpires will lose their ability to make decisions because of the reliance on technology that will follow the introduction of the referral system to all international cricket next month.
“There is a further problem that has arisen from the increased use of technology that international umpires have told me about. Umpires who have done Tests for five or six years have lost the art of giving out run-outs and stumpings – they just refer everything,” Willey was quoted as saying in this issue of The Wisden Cricketer magazine.
“If you have all the technology for a number of years, you are going to lose the art of giving out caught-behinds, lbws and everything else because the third umpire is doing everything.”
“The umpire will end up hardly having to make a decision. Then he stops doing Tests and goes back into first-class cricket and he has to start learning again. It could be dangerous for an umpire’s career,” said the former England all-rounder.
He also raised the intriguing possibility that TV technicians responsible for providing the pictures for referred decisions might have to be selected from countries independent of the competing teams.
“If you do use technology, do you have neutral people working the cameras and the systems? I am not suggesting that anybody would be corrupted but you will have to have neutral technicians.”
Willey said to take the pressure off umpires, there should be an increase in the number of Test officials and they should be allowed to stand only in one Test of a series.
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