How Much Discretion Should Umpires Have?
They should not have more discretion than they do. I explain why in this entry.
This question is prompted by the following interesting comment by a reader which I received on my previous entry about Angelo Mathews beign Timed Out here. For some reason (I have not worked it out yet), the comment appeared in my email notification, but is not visible on the website. The reader writes (i quote the relevant part):
I'm not sure that cricket would be better with a set of laws that didn't allow for unwritten concepts of acceptable behaviour to be determinative (in certain circumstances) of the outcome of certain actions. I'm fairly sure that cricket does not in fact have such a set of laws; if it did, it wouldn't allow captains to withdraw an appeal (amongst many other examples). I don't find it easy to know where the balance should lie...
The reader raises an interesting question about discretion. The basic mechanism by which discretion is available in cricket is through Law 31. For a batter to be out, one of two things has to occur:
a) The bowling side has to appeal (or ask) for a dismissal.
b) The batter has to walk.
Unless one of these two things happens, regardless of what happened on the delivery a batter cannot be Out on that delivery (for example, if a legal delivery from a bowler is missed by the batter and hits the stumps at the batters end, and the batter doesn’t walk, and the bowling side does not appeal for a dismissal, the batter is not Bowled).
The Law (in 31.7) says that an umpire can disallow an appeal if the batter has walked under a misapphrension (i.e. the batter has not been given out but thinks he or she is out and leaves the batting crease with the ball actually still in play and gets run out).
For a batter to be reinstated after being given out, the bowling side has to withdraw its appeal with the consent of the umpire.
In terms of the Laws of Cricket, the reader’s question basically boils down to whether the umpire’s authority should be expanded to disallow appeals even when the batter is out under the prevalent facts and law. Currently, the umpire has no authority to reinstate a batter who has been given out unless the fielding side asks for this to be done by withdrawing their appeal.
I think it is a bad idea to increase this discretion. The absence of any general discretion protects the umpire and the sport. Much of the outrage and unhappiness in sport comes from partisan, feudal, or, in a pinch, economic impulses within observers. Those who object are usually aggrieved that the team they support has been apparently unfairly treated (their concern is not with the alleged error, only with its direction), or that some feudal spirit (for example, the player is very senior and respected) has been violated, or to use example of the Mankad, they ask “will people not be denied their money’s worth if Kohli is dismissed like this at the non-striker’s end without a ball being bowled?”.
If the umpire is granted increased authority to apply discretion, then how does the umpire answer the usual leading questions which are posed in bad faith on these three bases?
Under the current law the umpire can reasonably and correctly point out that “the law requires it”. This protects the umpire. It is also desirable that the umpire be restrained in this way, because when umpires have only strictly specified leeway (such as, if the umpire concludes that the batter left the crease under the misapprehension of being dismissed), their decision making become easier to follow (or more transparent) to follow.
Any lawful behaviour in sport is acceptable behaviour. For instance, if the Timed Out law didn’t exist, then it is easy to imagine a side batting to save a Test in the final session taking several minutes to send its next batter out at the fall of wicket. This would be a far more effective form of time-wasting than the bowling side taking a few extra moments to confer and fiddle with their field. A comparable occurence from football is when a side which is protecting a lead late in the game takes much longer over every restart, whether its a throw-in, a dead ball or a goal kick. In football, this type of action is consider illegal and is policed by empowering referees to issue cards for time wasting.
The idea that what is acceptable in sport is different from what is legal misses the essential point of professional competitive sport. Sport is adversarial. The participants have competing interests. An competitive professional match is not a social occasion whose purpose is the conviviality of its contestants.
Whenever we don’t like a ruling by an umpire or a referee, we should ask whether the ruling is reasonable. How can we tell if the ruling is reasonable? Competitive sport provides a simple test through the following question: If the same ruling were against the other team, would we conclude that it was reasonable? If our honest answer is yes, then the decision in question is reasonable when it goes against our team as well.
This question of reasonableness is important because overwhelmingly, questions of acceptable behaviour, fairness in umpiring, or questions about individual decisions in all professional sport (especially in cricket and football) have their basis in unreason.
A game is an internally consistent closed system with a complete set of laws. By complete set of laws, I mean that every action during the game is legally legible - we can tell whether it is legal or illegal and whether there is a well-defined, enforceable mechanism for deciding how and when to rule on every illegal action. Further, and this is the absolutely essential part, all participants agree to all these rules before the game starts. This minimal set of conditions is met by every game.
The life which we all share on this earth, is not a game. It is not constituted by a complete set of laws. The minimal set of conditions which are required to create a game are not met in life. Further, life goes on if the laws change or break down or are enforced more or less strictly. Life is not constituted by laws, it only seeks to govern by them. This, in fact, is why games have been such an enduring human invention. This is also why, when it comes to life more generally, things like common sense, ethics, morality and restraint become significant. They govern the silences, contradictions and incompleteness in the law, to the extent that laws exist.
Applying that standard to a game leads to untenable positions like saying that ignoring the laws of the game is proper, while following them is improper. There may be circumstances in life in which this is true. But there are no circumstances in a game in which this is true. When a team chooses not to enforce a law in a game, it does so either because asking for the law to enforced does not improve their position in the match in their opinion, or because they’ve missed an opportunity.
Umpires in cricket should not have any general (i.e. not specifically limited) discretion to decide whether or not a law should be enforced because this absence of discretion restrains them, protects them, and protects the game.
As for our unreasonable feelings and impulses (we all have them, I do too), perhaps cricket is not the place to indulge them. Perhaps cricket (and sport is general) is a friendly, gentle place in which to become aware of them.