Another day of test match cricket, another clutch of umpiring errors, proved by the off-field technologists to be errors within seconds of the errors having been made.

Opponents of using technology to assist with cricket umpiring decisions bang on about two things.  First, they say that technology isn’t infallible, and that often technology doesn’t settle things.  Second, they say that the authority of umpires must not be undermined.

The truth is, however, that the authority of umpires is now being undermined, to the point of absurdity.  When umpires give top order England batsmen not out (Pietersen was wrongly given not out when in single figures, and again a little later on, and went on to get a hundred), and then within a few seconds, a camera slow-motion close-up and a graph from the Snickometer prove that the umpire got it wrong, to the complete satisfaction of however many millions of crickets fans the world over were watching, well, will you please tell me how the hell you could devise a way of more completely undermining the authority of umpires than that?  At present, the umpires are being made to look like chumps.  Chumpires, you might say.  It has to stop.

What is required – and it is a matter of when rather than if – is for the umpires to have at their fingertips the very same information that the commentators and then the massed ranks of the spectators now have, and to be able to include that information in their decisions.  The technies need to be told to speed up their analysis even more, and to devise ways of feeding the info to the umpires just as fast as that can be done.

Of course this technology, “Hawk-eye”, the one that now analyses LBW (leg before wicket) decisions, is in particular not infallible.  If Hawk-eye reckons that the ball would have clipped the top of the leg stump and that therefore the batsmen should be given out LBW, but if the umpires have their doubts, then the benefit of such doubts should go to the batsman.  If the umpires, for instance, reckon that Hawk-eye’s version of the swing of the ball after it has hit the pitch is too approximate, on a day where the ball is wobbling around wildly, then fine, they can say: NOT OUT.  If we fans then saw, after the umpires had already seen it, the Hawk-eye version, in which the ball just glances a bail, we’d understand.  We’d get it.

Meanwhile, even if Hawk-eye guesses about where the ball would have gone may be suspect, Hawk-eye better-than-guesses about where it did go, and in particular where it pitched, which is all part of whether a batsman is out LBW or not, are surely much more dependable, and should now be included in umpiring decisions.

What we punters do not get is what happens now.  Now, the umpire, with no help from slow-mo replays or sound analysis, misses something while it happened at eighty five miles and hour which, seconds later, is made obvious to us all when it is slowed down and when the sound it made is analysed.  Yet the umpires first and erroneous impression (or lack of it) is the one that is now allowed to stand.  There is no way the umpire would have made that decision had he had the info that we spectators have only moments later.  Yet he is stuck with his first impression.  Crazy.

Giving the umpires the technology would give them back the authority that they are rapidly losing all shred of now.

This is not about “technology versus human judgement”.  This is about judgement informed and assisted by technology, versus the unaided human eye and ear.  And the fact is that I, with the technology, can, again and again, do better than the umpires, without it.  That’s insane.  It has to change.  And despite the pratings of the luddites, it will change.  Soon.  The only question is how soon the techies can make it happen.

If the argument is that the technology is not, yet, quite quick enough to work without endless delays, well, that’s a respectable argument.  Maybe we could now have a complicated appeal system, with the attendant delays but with penalties for frivolous appeals.  Or, maybe it would be better to wait a year or two, and then go straight to a system in which the umpires get all the info in something very like real time – which is obviously how things will have to be in a few years time.  That’s a serious argument.  But the idea that technology must never be used to help cricket umpires to make correct decisions, but only, ever to hold incorrect decisions up to ever more instant ridicule, is just ridiculous.

I now find that I have said all this before, even the umpire chumpire joke, at Samizdata.  Oh well.  I’ve said it all before, and I will say it all again, and again, and again, until they get this nonsense sorted.