Umpire’s neutrality is one of the most crucial aspects of cricket, ensuring fair and smooth conduct of the game. It also functions as a watchdog for the game itself.
Initially, the umpires belonged to the home team and often indulged in unfair means, forcing a particular result. They were biased towards their team and infamous incidents of the past are enough to validate this.
Keeping in view the enormity of the issue, ICC passed a guideline regarding the neutrality of the umpires recently. It stated that an umpire belonging to the host country shall not be allowed to umpire in any match involving the country. ICC has experimented with the concept of having one neutral umpire in 1992. However, it switched to the policy of 2 neutral umpires from 2002 on wards. This was quite an event in context of the game.
Yet, this development received criticism by many experts. Some schools of thoughts lament this move by deeming it tyrannous and painstaking for the umpires who have to travel frequently round the year. Ironically though, the introduction of this rule saw the home teams faring much better with a win loss ratio of 1.57:1 as compared to the previous 1.43:1.
Nonetheless, one cannot owe the above mentioned statistics solely to the introduction of neutral umpires. Many more factors viz. playing conditions, pitch preparations too affect this. In any case, at the end of the day, it’s the umpire’s verdict which matters, so anything pertaining to that must be taken seriously.
edited by Bhavna Rachuri
