Darell Hair is back and that spells bad news for sub continental teams. Understand Hair was undergoing “rehab” for six months. ICC needs to explain the exact nature of so called “rehab” he has undergone. Till date, I have not figured out why Billy Doctrove escaped scot free as he was the other culprit at the infamous Oval test. In any case Hair’s return clearly means the quality of umpiring is going to decline further. I never thought he was a good umpire and some of his decisions have been outright atrocious. In any case, the rest of the “elite” umpiring fraternity is no good. Some of them wont be good enough to umpire in National competitions – to name a few Bucknor, Rudi Koertzen, Billy Bowden… even Aleem Dar is slipping these days. Gone are the days of 1990s when we saw some top quality umpiring with likes of Srinivas Venkataraghavan, Dickie Bird and David Shepherd at peak of their powers.
To improve quality of decision making, ICC should expand the elite panel as existing ones are just too tired covering too many matches and most important embrace technology in toto. Till then we have no option but to bear with third rate umpiring.
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