The chairman of the International Cricket Council (ICC), Greg Barclay recently stated that the governing body of cricket is working on a strategy to reinstate neutral umpires. Because of the lethal COVID-19 virus, the International Cricket Council (ICC) was compelled to choose home referees in the year 2020. This was because the virus had caused all global sports events to come to a complete halt. Here in this article, we talk about ICC Cricket News on the
Re-Introduction of Neutral Umpires.
On the other hand, Barclay has made it pretty clear there is no formal clarification about the aforementioned matter. Despite the fact that he did not want to disclose any information on the timeframe owing to system failures, he gave his word that the framework would be implemented very soon. Over the last several months, there has been a decrease in the number of instances of COVID-19. Concurrently, there has been a significant increase in the number of people attending games at stadiums.
“I think in the COVID days, the home umpires got some exposure to stand for Test umpiring. It split things a bit wider. If you look at the stats, you can see that there was a pretty much thereabout the teams’ performances than what we had the neutral umpires,” Barclay said.
“We are now on the other side of the COVID and we are reintroducing the neutral umpiring arrangements which were decided in the board meeting we had a couple of weeks ago. We will see neutral umpires back up and running again. I can’t give you the date due to operational issues but soon”, he added.
ICC Cricket News: If we can get the game to spread across the globe, it is great for cricket – Barclay
Reports indicate that for each of the Test matches, there’ll be 2 on-field umpires, with either of them acting in a neutral position. The 4th umpire will be a home umpire, whereas the match referee, as well as the TV umpire, will both maintain their impartiality throughout the match.
“Test cricket is still a great part of the cricketing landscape. I know that T20 profile-wise stands at the top. Test Championship is a very much part of the strategy of maintaining all the teams get equal opportunity to play”, he further added.
In spite of this, the home referees will be in charge of the white-ball contests, such as the One Day Internationals and the Twenty20 Internationals. In actual fact, neutral umpires have been chosen to officiate the two-match Test series that is now being played involving Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.
“It is part of the strategy. If we can get the game to spread across the globe, it is great for cricket”, the chairman concluded.
