Software to judge umpires performance

Good umpires or bad umpires? A lot has been said over the past few days about the standards of umpiring. But apart from a few obviously bad decisions, how can you really decide the quality of an individual umpire and compare his performance to others?

There are the obviously bad umpiring decisions - particularly easy for those of us watching on slow motion at home to detect. But the umpiring decisions that hit the headlines are just a tiny fraction of the calls made by an umpire through an entire match.

Software developed by Swantha in Bangalore, called Third Eye, can be used to assess the quality of an umpire, with each decision being fed into the system, and judged by the experts who can even log in from home.

According to Sandeep Kannambadi, Chief Technology Officer, "Whether an lbw decision or a no ball decision that has not been given, all the decisions will be scrutinised by a panel who will rate the umpire based on the decisions. This starts generating a score based on the results given by the panel - and based on the cumulative score we start to rate the umpire."

The system even takes into consideration pressure situations like judging whether Sachin Tendulkar is out or not, when he is on a score of 99. And it can easily indicate if errors are more frequent as the game progresses perhaps the umpire does not have the stamina to last out a long match.

And very importantly - the umpire himself has access to the analysis. And how would this system rate Steve Bucknor in Sydney?

"I think he would get a score which is negative because according to this any poor decision or bad decision is given a negative score. So from his last match I am sure he would have got a negative score." Sandeep told to NDTV.

The use of technology by umpires or their decision not to use technology to make their decisions has been very much in the news of late.