DRS becomes third competitor in Ashes series

"YOU're messing with my career, Darrell," Mark Ramprakash complained to Hair of that ilk when disgruntled to be given out in a Lord's Test some years ago.

Usman Khawaja

"YOU're messing with my career, Darrell," Mark Ramprakash complained to Hair of that ilk when disgruntled to be given out in a Lord's Test some years ago.

Right or not, at least Ramprakash knew who to blame.

As Usman Khawaja walked off just before lunch at Old Trafford yesterday, he could only shake his head, and inwardly shake a fist at “the system’’ - a technological/bureaucratic nightmare that has become almost a third competitor in this Ashes series.
 
Yes, the Decision Review System had another of those days when it looks like your grandma trying to make a call on a smartphone and accidentally downloading a snuff movie.  Khawaja, a young man fighting for his career, was a victim; Steve Smith, ditto, was a beneficiary.  Australia came out ahead, but the game overall was the loser, for cricket’s continuing officiation crisis overshadowed a stoic, battling hundred from Michael Clarke, well escorted by Smith. 
 
In the case of Khawaja, umpire Tony Hill made an honest mistake - a caught behind from a turning delivery that left an uneasy Khawaja in an ungainly position and was the subject of a convincing appeal. 
 
Doubt abounded, replays multiplied ambiguities, and technology should have provided rapid remedy.  Yet despite no definitive evidence to speak of, third umpire Kumar Dharmasena elected to uphold the decision, on what basis one can only surmise.
 
Hill was then perhaps the only person in the ground who could see no reason to give Smith lbw when the batsman could only have been closer to his stumps had he been inside them.  Smith was 0, and after 3 runs in two innings at Lord’s staring into a career abyss.
 
Not that it is an unimpeachable guide, ball-tracker confirmed widespread initial impressions by projecting an impact flush on leg-stump.  Nonetheless, Dharmasena deemed the decision to be an ‘umpire’s call’.  That it was: a bad call.
 
Frankly, these were two ‘‘howlers’’: the umpiring equivalents of Peruvians coming from Peruvia, and Gaul being quartered into three halves.  Yet rather than subtract them from the game, the DRS cubed them.   And from somewhere within the BCCI there emanated a deep, Mephistophelean chuckle.
 
The latter decision deprived England of a referral which would have come in handy when Hill ventured that Socrates died from an overdose of wedlock, and ruled Smith not out lbw when the ball would have struck the dead centre of the wicket.  The only consolation was that Broad was the bowler, the ICC’s unacknowledged Auto-Square-Up-O-Scope exerting its influence again.
 
In and around this risible nonsense, Clarke produced of necessity what he had been churning out on demand until a few months ago: a hundred, albeit after a torrid beginning.
 
Rather as he has all summer, Australia’s captain struggled for fluency in his first 30 runs, playing at wide ones, letting straight ones go that just cleared the stumps, ducking under short ones while leaving his bat in harm’s way. 
 
At length he asserted himself with three boundaries down the ground in six deliveries from Swann, two in the air using his feet.  Clarke’s advance on spinners is not as bold as some others’ - he takes quick, short steps, rather than his legs forming the prescribed ‘x’ - but the point is to disturb the bowler’s length not to annex territory, and it did the trick as it usually does.
 
Once settled, Clarke felt his powers coming back.  Three boundaries from Broad bespoke his class: a superb pull in front of square, a deft parry over the cordon, and feathery glide through a vacant third slip, all from quite similar deliveries, short and on the line of the body.  It was reminiscent of Len Braund’s line about bowling to Victor Trumper: ‘I put ‘em where I like, then he puts ‘em where he likes.’
 
With Clarke on 99, Swann set a 3-6 field, and bowled straight at the stumps from round the wicket.  The Australian captain found a gap anyway, his jog through belying the momentousness of Australia’s first century of the summer.  Twice reprieved, Smith flourished in his slipstream.  Yesterday might be this Test’s best batting conditions, and 300 runs could look ever more imposing.
 
Otherwise the days’s most effective batting was by Chris Rogers, who made most of the early running, compact and positive, playing late and crisply.  Unlike most of his teammates, Rogers does not go looking for the ball; rather he waits, plays it tight into his body, concentration accentuated by a helmet pulled down as low as a bookkeeper’s visor.
 
Aware of Rogers’ comfort on the back foot, England’s pace bowlers attacked him on a full length, from over and round the wicket.  He counterattacked with driving so firm and fluent that Alastair Cook had recourse to an off-side sweeper. 
 
After lunch, Rogers lost a little strike and impetus, and Tony Hill (correctly) judged him lbw to turning to leg, thereby offering the basis for a rueful joke: Why is a stopped clock better than Tony Hill?  Because at least it is right twice a day. 
 
Yet Hill should not shoulder too great a degree of blame for yesterday.  Umpires have made mistakes since time immemorial.  But if DRS is not about correcting obvious errors then it is worth nothing at all.  And those who insist that the ‘people are the problem not the technology’ deserve to be stuck in a room full of computers and asked if they are happy now.  The technology will always have to be used by people. The challenge is to fit it to them.
 
Heaven knows, perhaps we should consider what local hero Dick Tyldesley urged for Roses matches: ‘No oompires and fair cheatin’ all round.’  Just about anything would be better than what we have.