South Canterbury Cricket’s Mark Medlicott and Les Elliott are both in favour of the new yellow and red card system being trialled in cricket in England.
Proposals for the yellow and red card system include include sending off a player for the rest of the match for the most serious level-four offences, such as threatening an umpire, assaulting a player, official or spectator, and racist abuse.
If it is a batsman in the firing line, he will be ‘retired out’, while lesser offences like dissent, excessive appealing, swearing, unsportsmanlike conduct, could result in a yellow card or a five-run penalty.
Medlicott, who is the chief executive at South Canterbury Cricket, feels the use of cards will help.
“I certainly think it is something that could work.”
He said it was a great idea.
“Umpires will definitely use it. It will give them more authority in a way and help them make a call easier.”
Medlicott said he did not expect it to see it in South Canterbury anytime soon.
“We play under the rules and code of conduct issued to us by New Zealand Cricket and until that changes we won’t be using the system.”
While the system will help he said it will only work at certain levels.
“You can only give it to the proper umpires because it would not work in a game that had player umpires.”
Medlicott said it would be interesting to see how the trials go and if it would involve cutting out some of the judicial processes required for certain situations.
Elliott, who is the South Canterbury Cricket umpires manager, said it’s been a long time coming.
“We asked for something like this 10 years ago.”
He said he did not think that it would be implemented in a hurry.
“We usually do things on the back of what Australia Cricket do and it is likely we’d wait until they trial it.”
The representative umpire, who controls Hawke Cup fixtures, said it was needed in the game.
“I’m all for them. I think they will be great for the game.”
“I feel just having them will calm things down because players will be less likely to react if they know the umpire have those up their sleeve.”
He said they would only be useful to levels that had umpires.