Lillian Thomson
Hall of Fame Member
Excepting the old adage that umpires are human and make mistakes and that they even themselves out over time, I still think that some decisions being made at the highest level are no longer acceptable. It seems that an innings never passes without a fairly glaring error being made. The Katich one today was absolutely ridiculous and as an England fan I don't like to see things like that take some gloss off the achievements of the team. The standards today are almost certainly higher than they've ever been and some umpires from the past would not survive long given today's technology, but we now have a full time elite panel of umpires and even allowing for inevitable human error we are seeing decisions(like Katich) which are not acceptable. The players have to take a certain amount of blame for their incessent appealing - mainly for catches - when they know it's not out, but in the case of an LBW when the ball neither pitches in line or is going to hit the stumps is not exceptable at International level.