Never seen an umpire who so consistently fails to hear thin edges. I guess age is catching up with Rudi Koertzen. He failed to hear the thin inside edge on Gilchrist's bat and adjudged him Leg Before and he so faithfully failed to hear Sachin's thinnest of thin edges.
To be fair to Rudi, watching these wickets on television, Rudi seemed to have got them right. Coupled with the noise exodus in a thickly populated MCG, it was difficult to hear these close edges. Gilchrist's dismissal was the easier one to spot. While watching it live, I thought there was some odd deflection in the line of the ball before it hit the bat; a deflection that didn't look like late swing but of course, one couldn't hear a sound. In Sachin's case, watching the match live with a few friends at home, none of us heard anything or picked any deflection. Only after repeated replays and snicko's could one be sure that Sachin had nicked it.
This brings us again to the question of employing aging umpires in international cricket. Bucknor paid the price for too many mistakes and I feel, Rudi is aging fast and needs to be careful before he is reported by some disgruntled captain.
Surely the ICC must be doing some "Umpire hunting" overtime!!
1 comment:
Maybe you shd title your piece "A consistently terrible Rudi"!
But you are spot on- we do need younger umpires. And maybe to make sure errors are almost eliminated, allow the umpires to refer every appeal to the third umpire unless it is blatantly out. Yes, it will mean a few minutes of play lost every session (or at least each day), but the outcomes will be less random.
The ICC shd definitely be worried abt declining umpiring standards- but whether it is actually doing anything abt it, I cannot say.
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