Stifled at Sydney

: The nicest gesture of the Sydney Test was the Indian cricketers shaking hands with the umpires after close of play. After the umpiring outrage upon outrage that had been inflicted over the past five days, it was graceful and gracious of the injured party to keep the faith. Holding umpires guilty of incompetence — leave alone willful bias — is an allegation that should never be made casually. But the kind of umpiring that unfolded, day after the day from the moment the January 2 Test began, forces us to endorse a joke doing the rounds. Just as every pack of Benson & Hedges cigarettes carries a statutory warning, so should the umpiring combination of (Mark) Benson & (Steve) Bucknor.

There is already some anger against the Australians for not walking, for claiming catches that may not have been clean, for appealing for catches where there was no nick. This is misplaced. However, human error in umpiring is too much of a factor in cricket. All teams play with the notion, you win some, you lose some. And in some cosmic calculation, presumably, it all evens out in the end. In Sydney it did not — the sum of the errors took the game away from India. Those errors belonged to the umpires alone. There are arguments against using technology more frequently to decide tricky appeals; these nay-sayers must consider that at a time when technology makes errors too visible, can Cricket sustain suspicion and conspiracy theories drawn from this visibility?