Willey fears for future of umpires

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Willey - raising concerns

Former Test umpire Peter Willey has expressed his concern that the game’s top umpires will lose their knack for making decisions when the referral system is implemented next month.

Following a trial period deemed successful by the ICC despite the protestation of several pundits, the TV umpire review system goes live in October with all Tests set to use increased technology.
The trials witnessed a few bloopers, most notably during England's tour of the West Indies earlier this year, however Willey's concern is not the misuse of technology but the lack of decision making required from umpires.

“There is a further problem that has arisen from the increased use of technology that international umpires have told me about,” Willey writes in the October version of The Wisden Cricketer.

“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. 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 for you.

“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.”
Willey also questions whether neutral television technicians should be used to avoid sabotage when it comes to using the technology.

“If you do use technology, do you have neutral people working the cameras and the systems?” he asks.
“I am not suggesting that anybody would be corrupt but if a country’s top batsman has a decision pending and there is a ‘technical problem’ (“Sorry we’ve lost the pictures...”) you will have to have neutral technicians. “People think this is rubbish but at one stage nobody believed in match-fixing in cricket. How far do you go?”

Another suggestion the former England allrounder provides is that umpires only be used for a single Test in any given series to relieve some the pressure.

Poor umpiring was in evidence throughout the recently completed Ashes series in England, but while this is inevitable Willey feels there is a way to stop one bad umpiring performance from spilling over into the next match.

“To seriously take the pressure off umpires I would increase the amount of Test officials and let them only stand in one Test of a series; if an umpire has a poor first Test he is under pressure in the next game - I don’t care how strong you are you’ll be thinking about having a bad Test,” he says.

“Change the umpires for every Test match so they are fresh with no baggage from Test to Test. When I umpired in Tests I’d do one Test abroad might make a few bad decisions, come home and it is forgotten. You have five or six weeks off then you go somewhere else.”

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