‘Give extra power to match referee to intervene’
Bipin Dani
Former Sri Lanka captain Arjuna Ranatunga be-lieves that the visiting team should have lodged a protest against the Australian umpires, who didn’t declare the 5th ball of the last over faced by the Sri Lankan batsman as “wide”.
The commentators did admit that Marcus Stoinis’ delivery to Maheesh Theeksana was well outside the blue guideline and umpires not judging it proved costly to Sri Lanka.
“The SLC officials should have guts to protest against the umpires”, Ranatunga, speaking exclu-sively over the telephone, said. Interestingly, the top officials (president, secre-tary, the CEO) are already in Australia. It may be recalled here that it was captain Ranatunga, who had protested against the Australian umpires when the ace-spinner Muthiah Muralitharan was no-balled a number of times in the Boxing Day Test in 1995.
“In an international match and specially in T-20Is, one poor decision by umpires may change the result of the match and therefore, I suggest even the match-referee should be given power to intervene in the situation”.
“The technology should also allow third um-pires to call it wide as is the case in no balls”, Ranatunga added.
“I don’t say that the home umpires are biased but it brings extra pressure on them. If the team with extra players are allowed to travel, why the umpires from other countries can’t be sent to officiate ?”, he asks.
