Match referees have made vicious abuse of

The ill-tempered series in South Africa is the exception now, writes Scyld Berry

Like many complicated skills, officiating an international cricket match looks simple — until something goes wrong, as it has from the start of the South Africa-Australia series, which will forever be remembered for bad blood, not good cricket.

One thing has led to another in South Africa: verbals on the field in Durban were almost followed by fisticuffs in the pavilion between Australia’s David Warner and South Africa’s Quinton de Kock; Nathan Lyon fined for bouncing the ball near AB de Villiers after running him out; Kagiso Rabada brushing against Steve Smith after he was dismissed in Port Elizabeth; two South African officials reprimanded for fuelling the fire under Warner.

In New Zealand, meanwhile, their matches against England have taken place without the TV commentators picking up a single sledge.

The moral is that umpires must never let the verbals get out of hand. Once the sledging starts, one volley of abuse leads to another. Most of the time, however, international cricket is efficiently run and trouble is nipped in the bud. It is in the quiet but firm word by an umpire, and in the quick visit by the match referee to a dressing room to warn the captain about a certain player, that the skill lies.

Disrepute was a common feature of the 1980s when all test countries were fully professionalised. England’s captain Mike Gatting was squaring up to Pakistan’s umpire Shakoor Rana; West Indies’ Michael Holding, intensely provoked by New Zealand’s umpires, was kicking a stump out of the ground; Pakistan’s Javed Miandad was brandishing his bat to strike Australia’s Dennis Lillee; the racial abuse was often hideous. Viv Richards raged against it so nobody dared trying to bully the West Indies, but that did not stop white nations piling into test cricket’s new boys, Sri Lanka.

One man more than any has turned the game around, so that South Africa-Australia is the exception. In the mid-1990s, the International Cricket Council chief executive Malcolm Speed sounded out former Sri Lanka captain Ranjan Madugalle to recruit a panel of recently retired test cricketers as match referees.

Their job is “to ensure a match is played according to the laws, playing conditions and spirit of the game,” Madugalle said after the one-day series between New Zealand and England. “It is also to assess the umpire, the grounds, safety and security, and to be conduit between