BCCI cancels captain's feedback on umpires

Over the past few years, the Board Of Control For Cricket In India(BCCI) has been taking the feedback from the team captains after each match in order to use the feedback while reviewing umpires and recommending umpires to the International Cricket Council's (ICC) panel of umpires. But, so far the feedback system has not worked for the Board since the remarks left by the captains were found to be often biased and only served as a complain about the decisions taken on the field. On Monday, the BCCI has decided to put the onus on the match referees and scrape the captains' opinions.

"The match referee also serves as the third umpire. They are in a better position to provide a fair and balanced report with the help of video analysts. It has been done to eliminate any emotion in the reports. A captain can have bias or grudge against the umpire. The referee, in that sense, has nothing at stake," a top BCCI official told TOI.

"(But) the reports submitted by the captains didn't really help. They were written very casually. The captains neither talked about the positive nor did they mention any negative about umpiring which doesn't really help. It also came to notice that somebody other than the captain, like the manager or some other member of the support staff, used to file these reports," the official explained further.

Also with the BCCI's decision to use the Decision Review System (DRS) in the ongoing series against England, the third umpire will be a neutral one, unlike the other bilateral Test series in India.

Speaking about this decision the official said, "It is an ICC guideline to have neutral umpires if DRS is used. Anyway, we'll have few junior umpires from domestic cricket to be the fourth umpires. They can get a hang of how umpires operate on the field and off it once DRS is in play."

The BCCI is now keen to have its umpires accustomed to the system since only one Indian umpire S. Ravi has made it to the ICC's elite panel. With the services of Simon Taufel and England's Denis Burns brought in for the current series, the Board expects its umpires to learn about various situations during the matches from the experienced officials.

"The Indian umpires need to understand that if they can't get complacent if DRS is in play and also how bold they can be using it. They need someone who is currently doing it to speak to," the source said.