India icon Sachin Tendulkar on Monday interacted with fans on social media site Reddit where he answered a plethora of queries from a lot of people. If you are one of the people who wondered which cricket rule the God of the sport would change, then you most likely had that itch scratched as Tendulkar said that he would most likely scrap the Umpire’s call.
Tendulkar said that the players go upstairs for DRS due to them being unhappy with the on-field umpire’s original decision so according to him, there should be no option to go back to the same decision.
“I would change the DRS rule on Umpire’s call. Players have chosen to go upstairs because they were unhappy with the on-field umpire’s call. Hence there should be no option to go back to that call. Just like how players have bad patches, umpires too have bad patches. Technology even when inaccurate will be consistently inaccurate,” he said on a session of Ask Me Anything on Reddit.
This isn’t the first time Tendulkar has advocated that the umpire’s call should be done away with. In 2020, he said that the concept is flawed and argued that if the ball is hitting the stumps, even marginally, during the ball-tracking segment of the DRS, it should be given out.
“One thing I don’t agree with, with the ICC, is the DRS they’ve been using for quite some time. It is the LBW decision where more than 50% of the ball must be hitting the stumps for the on-field decision to be overturned. The only reason they (the batsman or the bowler) have gone upstairs is because they are unhappy with the on-field decision, so when the decision goes to the third umpire, let the technology take over; just like in Tennis – it’s either in or out, there’s nothing in between,” he had said in a video chat with West Indies legend Brian Lara.
‘Umpire’s Call’ is used when the DRS essentially gives the ‘benefit of the doubt’ to the on-field decision in case of inconclusive technological evidence. So when less than 50% of the ball is hitting the stumps, excluding the bails, as per the ball-tracking technology, it’s the umpire’s call. Teams, however, don’t lose out on their reviews in such a case.
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