The pope doesn't umpire sport

When I was playing I always preferred umpiring to scoring. I always felt like I was going to miss marking something in the book somewhere with so many places to mark each thing. While Umpiring I had the best place to watch the game from and quite enjoyed it. Sure I had players calling me a cheat for not giving a batsman out caught behind when he missed the ball by a long way, or LBW to a ball that was never hitting the stumps, but that's life.

No balls can actually be really hard to call too depending on the bowler. Some bowlers back leg is almost completely obscuring where the front foot lands and it's almost impossible to find a place to stand where you can get a decent view of the front foot. So there becomes a little bit of guesswork involved. Another annoying one is bowlers who's front foot never has the heel touch the ground. Generally finger spinners here. The law says straight line down from the heel, not, like run outs and stumpings where it has to be touching the ground behind the line. When you have a raised heel and have to judge whether it's behind the line or not from a point behind the bowler, it can be really tough, it's definitely a bit of guesswork there.

I'm not suggesting that change should be made, I'm just saying that would make it a lot easier to call. In a game where scoring is hard enough, you don't want to make changes to the rules that work against the attacking teams like that would, but I was mostly just trying to point out that with the rules how they are it's not actually an easy call to make live.

Cricket and soccer are different beasts when it comes to decisions. One decision can change a game. A couple of penalties or handovers in an AFL or NRL game are unlikely to affect an outcome that much Like we have seen in the last two NZ v AUs tests, poor decisions have very arguably played a big part in the outcomes. This is not to say Australia did not deserve to win the last Test. The no ball was a shocker - we have the technology to check these things so it should be done. No one expects umpires to be perfect - but where we have the technology to help them umpires should use it. That is the big issue here. Unfortunately, today sports betting is big business - that means that there is less room for error. Again, umpires are human and they will make mistakes - Illingworth's was a big mistake and he made several no ball mistakes during that game. He called two that were no balls (1 was the wicket) and he did not call two that were no balls. Recently umpires have been checking the no call if they think there was a no ball when there is a wicket - if Illingworth had done this there would not have been an issue.

More about the title and the fallibility mentioned in the article but Catholics only hold the Pope to be infallible when the Pope invokes his Papal infallibility and speaks ex cathedra. It hardly ever happens, about as often as we all agree that the foot wasnt behind the line.

Glen thank you for the article but as you probably are aware it is like urinating into the wind. I would love to see all the " expert match officials" on the sideline get out in the middle and give it a go themselves. Might find out just how hard it is to officiate. What annoys me is the "expert commentators " - mainly ex players of some note- whose knowledge of the rules is sometimes very poor but love to denigrate match officials.

Its a lot easier to fail fairly by your own doing than to fail because an umpire/Ref make a mistake. The no ball against Voges probably didnt decide that test match as the victory was a comprehensive one but when incorrect decisions cost a match or series (like the Adelaide test) then that becomes very hard to accept as history is changed, records are changed and the way teams are viewed is changed forever. I am also against players having to umpire themselves thru the challenge system as it seems to be creating just as much if not more ontroversy than the hometown refs used to. Close lbw apeals should be refered automatically and leave the challenge system to nicks and catches etc

Sorry Blake, all your comments prove is that you've never got off your arse and officiated. You make some appalling comments. Sure, players make mistakes when under pressure - but not always. Tennis calls them unforced errors, and they exist in the guise of dropping an easy mark, missing a straightforward tackle, missing an easy header, dropping a sitter at mid-on. Do you get it right EVERY time, when you only get one look at it at normal speed, or do you make your judgement from your lounge after the 4th replay? Have you ever looked at a pass from a player in full flight from slightly ahead or behind the ball and not been 100% sure if it's forward or not? Have you ever been close to a tackle with 10 arriving players acting at the speed of David Pocock or Michael Hooper ? Try it, then tell me there's no pressure, or that it's easy or that it shouldn't happen. Yes, officials sometimes make errors you scratch your head at. But so do players. And that's Glenn's point.

after a league and union career that went well into my40s I decided that, as I was a well known fountainhead for referees decissions and abilities as a player,now I had retired I would officially become a referee. Had one game, froze on important decissions, failed to correctly identify penalised players, got in the way of play, generally panicked and had the most miserable 80 odd minutes of my life.I still give referees the benefit of my vast knowledge from the sideline, but I do so with a guilty consience.

Yes Chris, Offside is incredibly hard to officiate. But your suggestion might make it easier for the official but would dramatically change the game, every pass forward would see defenders sprint out to leave the striker offside. Game would end up looking a bit like rugby league. There is no answer.

This pope umpires because half the team are too chicken to do it. I hate it.

Ask Damien Martyn. He was given 7 years exlie for his 'error'

Umpiring / Refereeing errors are a good way to excuse your team from losing. "We would have won if it wasn't for xyz decision". People generally tend to only see the errors against their own team too. So there'll be one incorrect decision that went against them that "cost them the game", but they ignore the fact that over the course of the match they benefited from more incorrect decisions than the opposition did. Also, it does give people the chance to ignore the complete failure of their team to play well. Things like the No ball call in the test match, you could say it cost NZ, but you could also say the fact that they weren't able to produce any sort of other chances against Voges was just as much the issue. If they were bowling well and creating chances then the no ball call may not have mattered because they might have got him out without too much damage being done. If they'd got him out for less than 50 then we wouldn't have been talking about the No Ball so much, but the fact they were barely able to even create a chance against him for another 232 runs was just as much an issue. Sure, he "should have been out already". But then batsmen get reprieves all the time, be it an umpiring mistake or a dropped catch or the like, it happens, and then the teams have to keep playing. If Vioges had got out next ball no NZer would have cared about the call. But their failure to get him out and allow him to get another 232 runs then is all poured on the umpire. I'm actually happy that he was at least trying to call no-balls. Now he'll probably be too scared to and will become like so many other umpires that barely look at the front foot and just refer it upstairs if a wicket falls, which will be a shame. Because no balls should be called the rest of the time too, not just when a wicket falls.

To be fair, I think Offside in soccer is a really tough thing to call live as a line judge, because the rule states it's at the time the ball is kicked, meaning the linesmen need to be watching for the moment the ball is kicked and then quickly looking back to the line to see if someone is off side, and when you have someone trying to time their run and burst through, in a fraction of a second they could travel several metres, and while they are onside as the ball is kicked, they are a good metre past the defenders in just a tenth of a second or so, and determining whether they would have been offside the moment the ball was kicked in that way, especially with a long pass from the other side of the field, can be really tough. It would be much easier to call is it was about where the ball was located rather than when it was kicked (ie you can be past the line once the ball is, or something like that, because then both parts of the judgement would be made looking down the defensive line, instead of having to look at two separate things at the exact same time as it is now). The number of times I've seen video ref in the NRL where all the commentators think it's a clear cut ruling and then the video ref comes back with the opposite decision is ridiculous though. This means there's just too much grey area in making decisions, where multiple people knowing the rules could look at the same thing and come to different conclusions. But I think that's an issue with the clarity of the rules rather than the video ref's themselves very often. If you have really clear rules as to how to interpret all these sorts of things then everyone can be judging knowing with identical criteria.

Classic example, that.

The article is a little strange, as someone with the vast knowledge of sports as the author does should know very well why umpires cop it. If my team lost due to a poor umpiring decision (IMO), i'm not just going to be banging on about it the next weekend. I'll be talking about it for months. Why? Because I care about the result, and it's much easier to blame umpires than the likely multitude of errors my team made. Although i'd disagree that player errors are brushed aside. Ask Tom Sheridan.

I remember at the opening bounce of an AFL fixture the kid I was passing , maybe 12 years at the most, was already yelling at the ref for not bouncing the ball straight. It seems to be ingrained. When playing pro league in NSW country it seemed the spectators were way more worried about the decisions than us playing.

Glenn, I have to admit the headline had me thinking you were setting us up for a Max Walker-style tale along the lines of How To Hypnotise Chooks et al!! But you are, of course, completely spot on. The age of the internet and social media and high definition and instant replays and forensic replays of replays means that any given moment can now be analysed to within an inch of its life and with immediate judgement handed down via public forum. And then the judgement overlooks significant detail! What a world we live in!!

You couldn't find better analogy than the Pope?! After all the abuse that's been going on in Catholic Church for decades, good old Pope is far from infallible. On the contrary. The title is in really poor taste as well as the sentence about the fellow in Vatican. Poor attempt at being witty because no one is laughing anymore when it comes down to clergy.

Players have to make decisions and execute skills while under pressure from the opposition. Officiating is generally making straight forward decisions, was it offside, did the pass go forward, was there hands in the back. Fair enough there is sometimes room for interpretation like deliberate out of bounds or LBW's and I have no problem with mistakes of this kind. But I'm continually amazed by the amount of incorrect offside calls in soccer, forward pass rulings in the NRL which is easily the most poorly officiated competition in the world and incorrect third umpire decisions in cricket and video ref rulings in the NRL when everyone in the world has one view but the official has another.