I think this morning should serve as the final nail in the coffin of the present referal system.
My main gripe with the whole thing is the ridiculous situation where a side is limited in the amount of referals they can make....Just look at the farcical situation with De Villiars 'dismissal' off Sidebottom, where there was the most blatent edge through to the keeper, which the unpire shockingly missed....Because England have run out of referals we have to just sit back and accept it, yet supposedly the whole referal system was brought in to flag up obviously poor decisions like that.
People say that having unlimited referals will lead to teams just constantly appealing against decisions?....Well, the obvious way to deter this would be to award penalty runs to the opposition if referals are found to side with the umpire's original decision....Thus, this morning England would have had De Villiars out a lot earler than he eventually was.
At the moment the main problem is that captains aren't sure whether to 'waste' a referal over a potentially borderline decision, which means that the whole thing is turning into a lottery, instead of being what it should be, and that is the simple act of correcting a human error on the umpire's part.
