The Laws of Cricket, ever since the Marylebone Cricket Club became its custodian in 1787, has been followed and understood by the men in white coat and the fraternity in the English language.
The Lord’s website says that the Laws have been translated into Bahasa in Indonesia, Japanese and its preamble in Slovenia. Brijesh Patel, Secretary, Karnataka State Cricket Association, said two years the Laws were translated in Kannada, and last year the Mumbai Cricket Association provided the Marathi translation.
Perhaps other State associations could follow suit. Soon there could be Laws of Cricket in Bengali, Tamil, Telugu and Malayalam. But for the Board of Control for Cricket for India (BCCI) the immediate plan is to produce a voice over version in Hindi for the benefit of umpires in Northern India. “That’s a big project”, said Ratnakar Shetty, CAO, BCCI.
The BCCI has been investing a lot of money for the umpires’ community utilising the expertise of Cricket Australia.
Two years ago it entered into a $ A 900,000 contract for three years with CA for 12 days of umpires’ seminar each year. The recent one was held in Bangalore with four time ICC Best Umpire Award winner Simon Taufel playing a key role. It’s possible Cricket Australia’s personnel will run a seminar for Indian Match Referees appointed for all BCCI tournaments, umpires’ coaches and umpire educators, all before 2010.
India’s national and Ranji panel and prospective umpires will also get the benefit of umpires coaching material that comes with the contract with Cricket Australia. As it is, India’s former umpires and a few current umpires are engaged in umpire educator’s programme in the five zones and also in the North-East States.
Some of the umpires involved in this BCCI initiative are S.K. Bansal. V.N. Kulkarni, Bomi Jamula, S. Tarpore, S. Ravi, M.R. Singh, Subrata Banerjee and Tej Handu.
