The umpiring decisions in cricket have improved beyond measure. Not ‘like with like’ maybe, but rather, ‘like with similar’.
I agree in some respects but fundamentally I still hate that you can’t celebrate your team taking a wicket because you’ve no idea if it will actually be out or not when the umpire’s finger is raised.
The trouble with these technological approaches to refereeing/umpiring is that all you do is you narrow the window of debate: so whereas before we would look at a player half a yard beyond the last defender and all be pretty certain that he was offside, now we have to look at the leg hairs of the players to make the same decision. The same applies in cricket where run-outs/stumpings/no balls are judged by fractions of the players’ boot being behind the line – or not.
Frankly, we’ve reached this situation because as a game we weren’t mature enough just to shut up and accept decisions. You end up with Match of the Day spending no time analysing strikers missing open goals or defenders passing the ball straight to opponents, you just get loads of discussion of whether the referee’s decisions were “correct”. And a decision in football often isn’t “correct” because it’s a matter of interpretation by a human being. Pundits who talk about “correct decisions” are themselves fundamentally wrong.
When VAR was first proposed, the errors that were highlighted like Frank Lampard’s “goal” in the world cup against Germany, were such obvious errors that the solution was to work with officials and raise the general standard, not ruin the game for the sake of the odd gaffe.
