**Official** New Zealand in Australia 2015

[Flem274*]

i think we need to send rain to the crease again. he had a good forward defence.

 

[Gob]

Yes but the predicted path did have the ball hitting. Basically the predicted path just visibly didn't really look like what the ball was doing (to me). Maybe a combination of a bit of an optical illusion plus my own bias.

more of this. That was hitting

 

[Zinzan]

Yup, Smith embarrassing himself in the box. What's new?

 

[Spikey]

good pick up the boy Hogan

Batting records | Test matches | Cricinfo Statsguru | ESPN Cricinfo

 

[thierry henry]

Yup, Smith embarrassing himself in the box. What's new?

I reckon he hasn't even really looked properly at that Latham lbw, he's just seen it was a generally in-swinging ball and has decided it's "just clipping leg" when he has the technology right in front of him showing the ball hitting the entire leg stump and even further inside. It's just poor trolling.

 

[adub]

Yeah you get a surprising amount of LBWs given on the pull, which you'd think wouldn't happen at all, simply because it looks so awful when you fall to your knees. Makes it look like it hit way lower than it really did, and it's always going to hit well back in the crease.

Plus as umpire when you see a guy collapsing into a pull and still having the ball go under the bat you're naturally going to assume it's kept low. You'd have to hate on spinners pretty bad to not give that one in real time.

 

[Zinzan]

I reckon he hasn't even really looked properly at that Latham lbw, he's just seen it was a generally in-swinging ball and has decided it's "just clipping leg" when he has the technology right in front of him showing the ball hitting the entire leg stump and even further inside. It's just poor trolling.

Smith was utterly unbearable when we took those early wickets at Lords earlier in the year. He's immeasurably worse as an "away" commentator, not that I'm much of a fan of his work at home either.

 

[Daemon]

McCullum double hundred imo

 

[Spark]

Anyway, as irritating as it was to see Lyon get worked repeatedly to square leg, that entire passage of play was great to watch.

 

[vandem]

Yup, Smith embarrassing himself in the box. What's new?

I always switch to radio when Smith is on. I assumed most real cricket fans did the same ...

Has been some excellent radio today. Jim Maxwell is always good, but have been impressed by co-commentators Rogers and Nannes.

 

[Spark]

I always switch to radio when Smith is on. I assumed most real cricket fans did the same ...

Has been some excellent radio today. Jim Maxwell is always good, but have been impressed by co-commentators Rogers and Nannes.

I have the radio commentary on regardless of who's on c9, the coverage is consistently excellent and the delay for me is actually almost non-existent.

 

[Zinzan]

Anyway, as irritating as it was to see Lyon get worked repeatedly to square leg, that entire passage of play was great to watch.

Different strokes for different folks I suppose, Personally I'm enjoying the rain.

 

[SteveNZ]

I dunno...it's probably bias as Thierry said but there's something that ****s me to tears about DRS. Umpires call is this massive circle jerk amongst officials to make their mates feel better about themselves. If it's hitting the stumps, it's out. If it's clipping, there's too much doubt associated with a system that is not 100% accurate and it's not out.

If you're going to use technology it shouldn't be governed at all by what a human thought in a split second on-field.

 

[Spark]

I dunno...it's probably bias as Thierry said but there's something that ****s me to tears about DRS. Umpires call is this massive circle jerk amongst officials to make their mates feel better about themselves. If it's hitting the stumps, it's out. If it's clipping, there's too much doubt associated with a system that is not 100% accurate and it's not out.

If you're going to use technology it shouldn't be governed at all by what a human thought in a split second on-field.

This literally makes no sense. "Well it's technically out but we're going to overturn the decision anyway because we're not sure about it?"

The reason umpire's call exists is so we don't suddenly overturn 120 years of umpiring convention by suddenly determining that really borderline decisions which would never be given out at any other level of cricket are suddenly given out.

 

[GIMH]

This literally makes no sense. "Well it's technically out but we're going to overturn the decision anyway because we're not sure about it?"

The reason umpire's call exists is so we don't suddenly overturn 120 years of umpiring convention by suddenly determining that really borderline decisions which would never be given out at any other level of cricket are suddenly given out.

Benefit of the doubt to the batsman arguably as logical as it being determined by the initial decision, no?

I'd go the other way personally. Clipping = out

 

[thierry henry]

The reason umpire's call exists is so we don't suddenly overturn 120 years of umpiring convention by suddenly determining that really borderline decisions which would never be given out at any other level of cricket are suddenly given out.

Dunno about the "importance" of umpiring convention tbh. Doesn't umpiring convention exist because we didn't have the technology to know whether LBWs were hitting or not?

It would definitely change the game but I wouldn't mind a system for LBWs where the umpire's call was irrelevant and it was simply out if it was hitting (with- comparative to the current system- a tiny margin of error where if it really was just faintly clipping, it was not-out) and not out if it wasn't.

Umpiring convention due to a former lack of technology is not the same as saying that the rule is that "it isn't out if it's only just hitting". If it's hitting, it's out.

 

[Spark]

Benefit of the doubt to the batsman arguably as logical as it being determined by the initial decision, no?

I'd go the other way personally. Clipping = out

Mm, yeah, but benefit of the doubt to the batsman only applies when there's that sort of doubt in the human mind. It's hard to convince people about doubt when you have the ball actually predicted to hit the stumps.

I've said this many times before, but the only change I would make would be to move the line which denotes umpire's call vs hitting to the outside of the stumps, rather than the middle of off/leg. Effectively making them a bit wider, so you don't get those strange decisions where the ball is clearly smashing leg stump out of the ground but it stays umpire's call.

Dunno about the "importance" of umpiring convention tbh. Doesn't umpiring convention exist because we didn't have the technology to know whether LBWs were hitting or not?

It would definitely change the game but I wouldn't mind a system for LBWs where the umpire's call was irrelevant and it was simply out if it was hitting (with- comparative to the current system- a tiny margin of error where if it really was just faintly clipping, it was not-out) and not out if it wasn't.

Umpiring convention due to a former lack of technology is not the same as saying that the rule is that "it isn't out if it's only just hitting". If it's hitting, it's out.

Umpiring convention is important so it retains at least some level of continuity between Test cricket and literally every other form of cricket. Batsmen shouldn't have to radically redesign their techniques - which they would if the stumps were effectively made way larger - just because they have to deal with Hawkeye.

I mean, yes, ultimately the ideal is a 100% foolproof decision that tells you whether it's going to hit or not, but whilst there's doubt built-in to the system due to the vagaries of frame-by-frame tracking and manually chosen impact points, it makes no sense to enforce such a drastic change to the balance between bat and ball.

And for the record, if it did happen that we suddenly came up with a system where every ball that hits in line and is shaving leg stump would be given out, I would advocate for a change to the LBW on those grounds. It'd be such **** cricket if that came into place.

 

[Kippax]

64 km Brisbane (Mt Stapylton) Radar Loop

 

[Johnners]

Testing out CA Live Streaming, is it possible to make the video full-screen on a PC? At the moment it's only a box that takes up the top 1/3ish of the page above the scorecard

 

[Prince EWS]

Dunno about the "importance" of umpiring convention tbh. Doesn't umpiring convention exist because we didn't have the technology to know whether LBWs were hitting or not?

It would definitely change the game but I wouldn't mind a system for LBWs where the umpire's call was irrelevant and it was simply out if it was hitting (with- comparative to the current system- a tiny margin of error where if it really was just faintly clipping, it was not-out) and not out if it wasn't.

Umpiring convention due to a former lack of technology is not the same as saying that the rule is that "it isn't out if it's only just hitting". If it's hitting, it's out.

Yeah I do essentially agree. What we've discovered since HawkEye us that the umpires had been getting a bunch of decisions wrong that no-one actually felt aggrieved about. This is problematic when devising a system to overturn poor umpiring decisions as you either end up changing the game significantly or just trying to find some sort of middle ground that amounts to "we want to overturn the random poor decisions that most umpires wouldn't get wrong without over-turning the ones that most umpires wouldn't have got right in the first place".

They've opted for the latter which I've always instinctively thought was pretty silly, but it's worth keeping in mind that the lbw law has been changed a bunch of times throughout cricket's history in order to find a balance between discouraging pad play and encouraging more exciting modes of dismissal.

When you really think about it, a lot of aspects to the lbw law seem completely arbitrary and unnatural in the first place; there's no way you'd intuitively think them up if you were creating the laws of cricket from scratch. They've been created like that to reach the balance we have currently, which IMO works well. If you realise that the current law should actually be leading to a bunch more lbws and implement a system to start giving those, you've thrown the balance of the law out and probably need to actually change it to avoid making the game far less balanced with significantly more lbws in each match.

To complicate things even further, we only have DRS at international level, so you'd get a situation where international cricket either followed fundamentally different rules to every level below when it came to lbws or the balance between discouraging pad play and encouraging more exciting modes of dismissal was completely off at either international level or every other level.