Well I've finished my first (partial) season and my Saturday afternoons are now devoted to playing cricket.
It was our 2nd second game yesterday and I was reflecting on the difference between umpire and referee at club level. In club cricket the normal practice is that two members of the batting side act as umpires (the duty is usually rotated every 10 overs) so if you're batting, it's a member of your own team you might give you out. This works incredibly well and in 24 years of playing men's club cricket I have only ever seen one incident of blatant bias by an umpire.
Even though there are plenty of contentious decisions you just don't see dissent in club cricket as happens constantly in club football. Why is this? I think there's a number of reasons:
1. Established norms of behaviour. It's the same people playing football as cricket in many cases but they behave better when playing football mainly because they comply to the norms of the environment, established from top to bottom in the sport. Football could learn alot from this...change the behaviour in the premiership, change it in the park.
2. Time to calm down. Cricket is essentially a turn-based, individual game wrapped up as a team game. The bowler who has an lbw turned down has time to calm down and get an explanation from an umpire before bowling again.
3. Perceived neutrality. The batsman who thinks he is "triggered" (given out wrongly, by an umpire with a "trigger" finger) can talk to his team-mate about it later when he has calmed down. However it's his team-mate who gave him out so he's not going to leap to the conclusion that he is a "cheat". A football referee whilst (ironically) more neutral is constantly accused of bias.
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I thought of a 4th point:
ReplyDeleteThere is a much greater age range of players in club cricket as people can go on playing well into their fifties (unlike football). I think this changes the atmosphere and less "angry young man" syndrome.