Good point, silly all the same.

Match drawn, Gloucs now a must win.

My colleagues Harry Everett reports on today's events:
https://deepextracover.com/2022/09/lv-county-championship-warwickshire-v-somerset-day-four/
We had an interesting day together yesterday viewing things from our different perspectives. He seems to have picked up some Bears related snippets from me - e.g. his Alex Davies remarks in today's report.

GerryShedd wrote:

My colleagues Harry Everett reports on today's events:
https://deepextracover.com/2022/09/lv-county-championship-warwickshire-v-somerset-day-four/
We had an interesting day together yesterday viewing things from our different perspectives. He seems to have picked up some Bears related snippets from me - e.g. his Alex Davies remarks in today's report.

And also from this forum - he asked me for a link to it today!

Just seen the Burgess dismissal replay. We’ve had some stinkers this year. Hits it and it’s high. He clearly couldn’t believe it.
It’s not quite as bad as Hains caught behind or Burgess’ LBW at Surrey but it’s up there.
You look at that one given and the Gregory one not given in the first innings and wonder how that’s possible, and also wonder could the match have been very different potentially.
The more you watch and see dismissals like that, the more you see why Lancashire put out the statement they did. Umpires in theory have accountability, but the dearth of numbers means they can’t truly be dropped from the panel. And so there’s no true incentive to improve standards.

There is obviously a lot more scrutiny on it because of live streams and increased footage but the standard the standard of umpiring seems dreadful.

It must be a tough job and I respect anyone who does it, I appreciate they get lots right but there are some real howlers being given lately.

You do have to wonder with someone like Neil Mallender though, how he gave a few stinkers, he played the game for ages and yet we have seen some awful decisions and yet because of Covid, the way Tests had to be played with home umpires threw up some thought of potentially poor games on the horizon and yet out of all that came Michael Gough, now one of the best and most respected umpires in the world having had a career much shorter than people like Mallender and not as successful and yet he is now at the top of his game as an official.

I can see that, where DRS is in operation, umpires can be judged by what proportion of their decisions prove to be successful. But that obviously doesn't apply to many county matches.
It used to be the case that county captains filled in an evaluation of the umpires after each match. This allegedly led to a reluctance on the part of umpires to give captains out. That was particularly so back in the days of amateur captains when the umpire was almost certainly a retired professional player and knew that he was supposed to touch his forelock to any amateur and call him "Sir".

Unless I mis-heard him, Mark Robinson suggests that, as well as the Burgess dismissal being "unlucky", the run out was a bad umpiring decision too:
https://edgbaston.com/news/mark-robinson-reflects-on-somerset-draw/

With the Yadav one, the commentator on YouTube said he was looking at Hain in disbelief.

To me it seemed as though Yadav was giving the umpire the stare and absolutely thought he wasn't out.

From the stream could not tell either way the stumps and crease were both out of shot at the ball the hit the stumps.

In the replay on the Club site, you can stop the action at the critical moment and the run out looks very marginally not out. In the old days, the umpire would have said to the complaining batsman "Look at tomorrow's paper"; I guess now they would say "Look on Cricinfo."

The thing for me with umpires errors is the approach taken by domestic umpires seems wrong.
I know when I was coming through and playing, the mantra was always that the benefit of the doubt goes to the batsman, and you have to be 100% certain to give it.
The DRS era has done away with that, as umpires are feeling braver to make decisions. But in county cricket there is no DRS, and umpires are not as good as those on the elite international panel. So they’re employing the same mentality of being 90-95% sure it’s out, but without the top level ability, but also without fear of being overturned.
So you get bravery to give the very marginal calls out, there’s no way to learn from it because no DRS and it’s becoming far more obvious because streaming replays can not only show some decisions were wrong, but it highlights the regularity of the howlers.
It also doesn’t help there seems to be an increase recently in penalty points for players dissenting, so players feel punished twice not only did they get a poor decision but they get fined and the team gets disciplinary points. I know it’s a pillar of our sport to always respect the umpire. But it’s professional sport, it means something as a club but it’s players careers too.