“‘Razor’, you need to have a word with your father-in-law!” – Carl Rackemann to Ray Price about umpire Kevan Barbour.
Telford Vice / Cape Town
YOU’RE a bowler and the captain tosses you the ball. One of the standing umpires is your relative. To mark out a run-up at their end is a no-brainer, surely. Not if you’re Ray Price, the former Zimbabwe left-arm spinner.
“It was the opposite,” Price said when asked whether he made sure he bowled from the end where he had familial connections. “I mean, you want to try and stay away from your father-in-law as much as you can.”
Price played 140 international matches from December 1999 to March 2013. In two of his Tests and 16 of his ODIs one of the umpires was Kevan Barbour, the father of Julie Barbour, who married Price on July 13, 2002.
“He was quite a mingy bugger when it came to giving lbws,” Price said, and related an interaction with Carl Rackemann, then Zimbabwe’s coach, during one of Barbour’s Tests, against South Africa at Queens in Bulawayo in September 2001. “‘Rackers’ pulled me aside and said, ‘Razor’, you need to have a word with your father-in-law!’”
Price’s off-field challenges went beyond his relationship with umpire Barbour. Julie, Kevan’s daughter, Ray’s wife, was a scorer. “That also didn’t help,” Price said. “She was astute and could see things from a different perspective. Either I wasn’t bowling well or I was doing something dumb, like cussing Brian Lara.”
Price did indeed give one of the premier batters the game has seen a tongue lashing in a Test in Bulawayo in November 2003, 15 months after his wedding to the woman who sat upstairs dotting and dashing her way through the match. Lara scored 191 off 203 balls. “I went for 199 in that innings and I think Lara hit me for about 180 of them,” Price said. “Cussing him wasn’t my wisest move.” Rudi Koertzen and Simon Taufel were the umpires. Had Barbour been there to have a stern chat his daughter’s husband might have been spared a pasting.
“We’ve had quite a few laughs about it,” Price said of time on the field with his now retired umpire-in-law. “He’s adamant that he wasn’t stingy and I’m adamant that he was. It never really affected us. He was always very professional. He’s a staunch guy; fairly trustworthy.”
Barbour was a house master at Peterhouse, one of Zimbabwe’s most prestigious schools, and a postmaster. Fairness and propriety come standard in those vocations, as they do in umpiring.
Price’s warm feelings towards umpires went beyond Barbour: “When I started you had two home umpires. That was tough in Pakistan or India. The pressure was on them, and they had to go home to a life outside the game. I’m glad I didn’t have that pressure.”
But umpires remain, after everything, human and thus susceptible to making errors. Not that they make many. “Umpiring has improved so much,” Price said. “It’s amazing how many soft calls they get right.”
Even so, DRS means some of the umpires’ mistakes are corrected before they influence the events of a match. What hasn’t changed is what players want from umpires: consistency. They won’t have that in a significant way in the upcoming men’s World Cup qualifiers in Zimbabwe.
DRS will only be used from the Super Six stage onwards. Replays will help the third umpire adjudicate on runouts throughout, but other than that the humans will be on their own in the 20 matches that comprise the first round from June 18 to 27. Effectively the tournament will be played under two different sets of playing conditions. Price didn’t see that as a problem: “It’s the same for both teams. It’s like having a short boundary on one side of the ground.” But that won’t hold if an umpiring error that might have been fixed costs a team their place in the Super Six.
In the previous edition of same tournament in Zimbabwe in 2018, when DRS wasn’t used and the third umpire had help on runouts only in the 10 matches that were broadcast out of the 34 played, Scotland would have sealed a spot in the 2019 World Cup had they won either of their last two Super Six games. Against Ireland in Harare, Bradley Wheal had Andy Balbirnie lbw bang to rights in the third over. Balbirnie had scored a single. He batted on until the 45th and made 105, the key to the Irish’s 271/9 — good enough for them to win by 25 runs. Three days later, in a rain-affected match also in Harare, Scotland needed 26 off 23. Richie Berrington and George Munsey had shared 38 off 58 in their fifth-wicket stand when Berrington was given out lbw to a delivery from Ashley Nurse that seemed to be sliding down leg. West Indies won by five runs.
At the heart of the DRS disparity is money, with the system costing between USD15,000 and USD12,000 per day. Some broadcasters pay that bill in full, others reclaim it or part of it from the host board. The idea that the ICC or national boards should pay for what they write into their rules about how the game is to be played under their auspices hasn’t caught on, perhaps because broadcasters use elements of DRS to enhance their analysis on air. As long as they pay they keep the toys.
That DRS has changed big cricket irrevocably is unarguable. Or is it? There are many rabbitholes to go down in the course of exploring the question, and it doesn’t help reach a definitive answer that the allowable margin of uncertainty and the number of referrals available have changed. Neither that the system isn’t used in all internationals.
So, as this isn’t a deep dive into what DRS has done to cricket, let’s keep it simple and look at what it has done to lbws. No longer can batters plonk their front foot down the pitch to pad away deliveries, secure in the assumption that they have created enough doubt in the mind of the umpire that the ball would have hit the stumps. The gizmo will reveal all. Has DRS led to a significant increase in successful lbw appeals?
In the 10 years before the system was officially adopted in Tests in November 2009, 463 batters were trapped in front in the 430 matches played by men in the format. In the 10 years after DRS was adopted 436 were given out lbw — with and without electronic help — in 440 Tests. That’s an average of 1.08 lbws per Test without DRS and 0.99 with it in place.
In the 582 men’s ODIs played in the 10 years before DRS made its white-ball debut in January 2011, 1,409 players were out lbw. Or 2.42 a match. In the 586 ODIs played in the next 10 years, 1,188 were dismissed in this way. That’s 2.03 a match.
DRS hasn’t been around for 10 years in T20Is. For five years before it came aboard in October 2017, 334 were out leg-before in the 201 T20Is played. That’s 1.66 on average a game. Five years later 1,186 had suffered the same fate in 753 matches: 1.56 a game.
All told across the formats, and in accordance with the above parameters, 2,206 batters were dismissed lbw in 1,213 matches before DRS, and 2,810 in 1,779 afterwards. That’s a before rate of 1.82 per game and an after figure of 1.58. The number of batters trapped in front fell in the 10 years after the advent of DRS. But not by much: the overall difference was 0.24.
That and the fact that DRS wasn’t available at all of those matches would seem to support the argument that the system hasn’t had a significant impact on lbws. There is evidence that spinners have benefitted — 3.86% more of their wickets have been leg-before since DRS — but also that fast bowlers have been less successful, by 2.98%, at trapping people in front.
Maybe that’s because, mostly, umpires know what they’re doing — 72.8% of all on-field decisions, for lbw and everything else, sent upstairs come back down as they were. They have withstood forensic scrutiny and not been overturned, a clear vote of confidence in the eyes, ears, composure, skills and instincts of the people who made those calls in the first place on the basis of what they saw and heard once in real time.
“You want to make the decision on the field but people make mistakes,” Barry Lambson, who stood in five Tests and 35 ODIs and was the television official in four Tests and 23 ODIs, all of them before the DRS era, said. “I think it’s made the third umpire more important than the umpires on the field in a lot of instances.”
Electronic umpiring itself has changed vastly since Lambson’s day. He remembers serving as the third umpire in a Test against Australia at Newlands in March 1994, and having to stare at “this little box thing” to adjudicate a runout appeal after the wicket had been broken with Kepler Wessels dashing for the crease. “The match referee [Donald Carr] was standing in front of me keeping the sun out so I could see the screen. I gave him out using the replay from the camera behind the bowler. The bat was just before the line.”
Lambson has moved on to match refereeing, his role in 284 first-class, list A and T20 domestic games so far. Has he had to involve himself when he sees a decision going awry? “We’ve had very few incidents like that in South Africa, where we’ve said to the TV umpire that maybe they should look for another angle. We can step in, but the TV umpire can’t ask you, as the match referee, what you think.”
Price has reason to wish that could happen, and on no less an occasion than the match that delivered Matthew Hayden’s then world record 380, at the Waca in October 2003. “He was out on zero,” Price said. “Andy Blignaut was bowling from the Members End, and … dead. Absolutely dead. Lbw.”
So Price feels cricket is a better game because of DRS? “It’s always hard to compare across eras, but it came in towards the latter stages of my career and it made a huge difference for us.” What did it do for his own bowling? “I’d be lying if I said it changed anything I did. But it made batsmen more worried about being hit on the pad.”
Price hasn’t played any cricket of consequence since his last Test, in Barbados in March 2013. “I spend most of my time fishing these days. It’s fantastic. I’ve got no DRS or umpires to worry about. And no crowds. When you travel round the world playing cricket you get it in the neck from the sidelines, especially away from home.”
Not that life is always peaceful with rod and line in hand, like the time Price and Heath Streak went fishing on the Zambezi, the mighty river that separates Zimbabwe from Zambia …
“I hooked a giant tigerfish and was busy fighting it; it was jumping all over the place. After about 10 minutes the fish jumps and gets off the hook. Heath and I were despondent because it was a decent size.
“From this little village on the Zambian side, all I heard was, ‘You’re useless!’ I said to Heath we’ve been all round the world and been given a hard time from the stands, and here we are in the middle of the Zambezi where there’s maybe 50 people in a 100-kilometre radius, and this oke is also giving it to me from the side. We just can’t get away from it.”
Just like DRS, which doesn’t care if you’re the fish, the hook, the angler, or if the umpire is your relative and the captain tosses you the ball.
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