foreignfield wrote:A wrong decision is a wrong decision, giving a tailender wrongfully out is as a bad a decision as shooting out an opener, as far as the decision is concerned. Unless you think the umpires give a batsman out on purpose because he plays for Team A or B (conspiracy theories). I think you can't say the umpires in this series have been biased towards one side.
But in a way I can understand your anger/frustration/point Kriterion because the cliché that "umpiring mistakes even themselves out" is palpably untrue -- not only in this case. Trouble is nobody has yet come up with Duckworth/Lewis tables for it. It is one of the vagaries of cricket -- especially without DRS which tends to get rid of the howlers (while in turn producing marginal decisions which sometimes are not great either).
Its true that a wrong decision is wrong regardless of how obvious or unclear it is. Its also true that giving Chris Martin out on a very marginal call is equally wrong to giving Tendulkar out shoulder before wicket. However, the value the wrong decisions are far from equal.
I went back and looked at the CI commentaries for this series (both Tests). It appears that ZIM have gotten 10 wrong calls go against them and BD about 6. I was expecting it to be the other way around! But I guess you only remember the bad calls that go against you. However, in ZIM's case each of the wrong calls individually were "routine" mistakes or "marginal" calls, the likes of which are seen in practically every Test not officiated by the elite umpires (Aleem Dar, Asad Rauf, et al). These calls are wrong, but the inside edges are so faint that one can't really blame the umpires as its human error. These are the ones DRS is needed for the most. There were only 2 "howlers" this series, according to my count so please correct me if I'm wrong, and both were against BD and involved the #1 and #3 batsman. If it was #10 and 11 it would made less of a matter.
Now, that 10-6 split in our favor pretty much off-sets the 2-0 howler split in ZIM's favor. Of course, no one knows for certain, but in that sense the cliche holds true that "umpire errors even out over time".
Thus the umpiring in this series has been pretty poor. It hasn't affected the outcome of either match since they wrong decisions evened out. ZIM got more wrong decisions, but we copped the biggest two. But it has affected the quality of the series. This series would have been of far higher quality if the right calls had been made.
Before, we (Bangladesh) would kind of expect this since we're always the weaker team and another cliche of bad umpiring is that the weaker team always gets the rougher end of the deal. But after this series, I'll bet the BCB will at least attempt to solve the problem as much as possible (i.e financing DRS in as many of our series as possible).
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