Henry Blofeld: Time to quell the carping over television verdicts

Traditionalists are having a field day. For the first time, last Thursday, in Colombo, the third umpire, Rudi Koertzen of South Africa, was asked to give his views on an lbw decision. Sri Lanka's left-arm over the wicket seamer, Chaminda Vaas, had caught Pakistan's Shoaib Malik on the crease and had rounded on the Australian umpire Daryl Harper, demanding that he be given out.

In this unnecessary one-day tournament, spawned like so many of its ilk by greed, third umpires can now be brought into anything and everything, even though they are only allowed two replays. Television reigns supreme, but we knew that anyway. It is none the less an interesting and inevitable development, and has been ever since the third umpire was first brought into it.

We are now being deliciously squeamish about it all, almost as if someone is having the audacity to suggest that we have been caught with our hands in the till. What absurd nonsense. Umpire Koertzen had a look and quite rightly gave Shoaib out. If Harper had not been sure he would have said not out, so who and why can anyone object to the correct decision being given?

How appropriate it was that this first instance of a third umpire being asked to adjudicate on an lbw decision should have been one of those that the umpires in the middle get wrong as often as any. Even the most experienced umpires sometimes fail to spot that the ball has pitched outside the leg stump when a right hander is facing a left-arm over the wicket bowler or, more often, when a left hander is facing a right-arm over merchant.

In these instances when they get it wrong, the prying eye of television brings, one hopes, blushes to the cheeks of the umpire concerned. Yet the old farts are apparently saying that this is just the stuff of which the game is made and that part of the character-building aspect of cricket is learning to accept the demons of fate with grace.

They will soon have us whistling Colonel Bogey when the decision is shown to be wrong. What a load of cobblers! Cricket is turned into a laughing stock when it fails to get its decisions right. When, in a crucially important match, a batsman is given out and the entire world can see on their television screens before he has walked 20 yards to the pavilion that he was not out, one could be forgiven for wondering what the point is of having the Laws in the first place.

If the means of ensuring that a correct decision can be made are available and they are wantonly ignored, we are surely in Walter Mitty country. It is all very well saying that the Laws make provision for incompetent or inadequate umpiring in that they state that when there is the smallest shadow of doubt, the advantage must be given unerringly to the batsman. We are not talking here merely about making allowances for indecision, we are talking about correcting a palpable mistake.

Of course, in one sense it will alter the game in that more questions will be asked of the third umpire and there will therefore be more delays. The television whizz-kids have speeded up the process since its inception and it has reached the point where they surely cannot be much faster with their replays. We must live with what we have got.

There will naturally be delays when line-ball decisions have to be made, but on the other hand the suspense while waiting for the third umpire to make his decision adds another frisson of excitement to the game. I am all for international matches being decided by correct decisions rather than by whichever quarter the moon happens to be in or by the whim of an umpire who goes on percentages and ignores the "beyond all doubt" clause.

The old farts say that umpires in the middle would then have nothing to do but count up to six each over – and they do not always do that as well as they should. On one day of the recent Oval Test there were an embarrassing number of seven-ball overs. Even if the third umpire also lends a hand with the counting, it still leaves an extremely important role for the umpire in the middle, which the third umpire sceptics have so far failed to spot. One of the problems with the contemporary game is that the attitude of "anything goes", has been allowed, over the years, to take over. The Laws are always being stretched to the limit and beyond. The obiter dicta of those assembled within immediate earshot of the batsman would form a superb basis for a thesaurus of swear words, expletives and general unpleasantness.

Wouldn't it be lovely to think that, armed with the support of the International Cricket Council, who in the past have supported umpires with nothing much more effective than mouldy cucumbers, the two in the middle might at last be able to devote themselves to policing this situation? No, there is no reason to fear that the two gentlemen in the middle will become redundant. It is worth remembering too that we do, after all, live in 2002 and not 1962.