More whingeing about officiating

The brouhaha over the second test at Sydney between India and Oz highlights the peculiar roles of officials in modern big-business sports. Officials aren't paid terribly well. They're people who love sports and they're motivated by being "on the inside". It's very rare that any of them are ever even moderately average ex-players. One of the exceptions that prove the rule was Rev David Sheppard who became a cricket umpire after a distinguished career as a batsman. He was a genuine anachronism from the era when cricket was played by "gentleman" (amateurs).

In sports as disparate as NFL and cricket we have now seen glaring examples barely a month apart.

There need not be bribery involved: although clearly that does go on.Nowadays officials are easily manipulated by the shysters and general money-men and geniuses that run sports. The latter use the power to appoint - to big games in particular - to elicit desired outcomes from game officials. Nothing direct has to be said. It's the same mechanism as is seen everyday in the workday world: brown-tonguers learn very quickly what to say to impress the bosses. With officials it's reflected in approval-seeking actions. Remember these guys are pros. They know much, much better than fans what goes on, what's acceptable rule-bending etc. They know when to make a judgment call that can stand relative to the rules but they know darn well is not the way the game is played. In soccer-football one area is the use of the arms. Watch the pros carefully in tight spots; a lot of arm use. Refs know they can't call this: there's no defensible line to be drawn once they start. In contrast, they'll call penalties now and again for armwork - this is a dead giveaway that they're trying to even up or edge a game in someone's favour. I suspect that in NFL the rough equivalent is holding. It could probably be called on every play but is used only for "flagrant" offenses or when the momentum of a game needs tweaking.

I have no doubt that he NFL brains trust favoured a storyline for the season that saw the Pats go undefeated; look for a "moral" denouement - they don't win the Superbowl. This doesn't mean that there was wholesale fiddling - just when it looked like they might lose, with Baltimore the big example of where it got out of hand and the officials had to make blatant remedying calls. Down Under the storyline is the Ozzies' triumphant win streak. This lead to probably the most disgraceful episode of biased umpiring of which I'm aware - which was only a continuation of the
umpiring assault on India from the first test but which reached epic proportions in the final session of the match, when 7 Indian wickets fell. Now the players normally go along with this mostly but this was so egregious that it just stuck in the craws of Kumble's men.

The accusation against Harbajan is just a smoke-screen and the countercharge against Hogg is also designed to distract attention from the real issue - crooked officials - by focussing attention an old-chestnut non-issue, viz. sledging. The bright boys know that prologued public contemplation about officiating could be ruinous but the sledging issue will blow away. I'm not saying that there's nothing to the underlying incidents - these are cricketers not actors - but that sort of chatter goes on every day and always will. Most of the public - who've never played at any reasonably competitive level - don't know this; so the spin will work.

With the money involved there's almost certainly nothing can really be done of a radical nature any more: you just have to take a lot of "achievements" with a pinch of salt. The big picture, though, remains intact. Guys with 100 innings and an average over 50 can really bat. Hitting 750 dingers means Barry Bonds is a great ballplayer, period. Likewise 6 Cy Youngs and Roger Clemens. The current Oz cricket team is one of the real great ones without umpiring help. Ditto the Pats. Steroids use just allowed these exceptionally competitive people to work like the devil to get better bodies. (This is a topic for another day but it's pathetic to see both of them lying their pants off to preserve their shots at Cooperstown.) Maybe there'll be a turn of the screw when the geniuses realise this and that they don't have to monkey with officials to create false "drama" and the extra eyes, hence advertizing revenues that they think comes with it. Then we'll be left with old-fashioned bribery and corruption, which can be virtually eliminated by video review. But, as Keynes said, we have to pretend fair is foul and vice versa a while longer -because that's the way market capitalism works - and just hope that by the time we can drop the pretense that we still know the difference.