Sunday, July 29, 2007

The world's best umpire

It is widely claimed, especially in the British and Australian press, that Simon Taufel is the world's best umpire.

Taufel was one of the field umpires (the other being Darrell Hair) who ruled Inzamam-ul-Haq run out when he left his crease to avoid a throw. Hair has, of course, since quit amid controversy over his calling off a Test between England and Pakistan after alleging ball tampering, and subsequently demanding money to retire. At the time, Taufel said Hair "knew the laws better than anyone"; Inzamam would beg to disagree.

And, today, Taufel has wrongly sent back Tendulkar and Ganguly -- both of whom were approaching centuries.

If these are the world's best umpires, we badly need more TV referrals, and should delegate all LBW decisions to HawkEye.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

do you think that hawk eye is accurate enough?

Rahul Siddharthan said...

It's most certainly more accurate than any human could be. Humans don't do complicated dynamics calculations in their heads.