An Aussie we feel sorry for...

It's a rare day when we express sympathy for an Australian cricketer. But Usman Khawaja deserves our expression of sympathy today after being sawn off in the third Ashes test match at Old Trafford in Manchester overnight. Watch the action as it unfolded right here:

On-field umpire Tony Hill made a real howler here. The ball spun past the edge of Khawaja's bat, simultaneously with Khawaja's bat hitting the pad, the sound of which was clearly audible. He missed the ball by some distance. Hill raised his finger, and Khawaja challenged the decision, as is his perogative.

Here's where the ICC's Umpiring Decision Review System failed. Brydon Coverdale from Cricinfo describes what happened next:

In the third umpire's room at Old Trafford, Kumar Dharmasena got it wrong on Usman Khawaja's dismissal. In a van in the car park, Nigel Llong might have got it right. Llong is the unofficial official at the Manchester Test, trialling a new system that puts replays at his fingertips. While Dharmasena asked Sky Sports producers to cue up video and audio, Llong was sequestered away from the action with a wall of replay screens at his immediate disposal.

If he wanted a side-on view, he could have it. If he wanted a rear angle, he could play that himself. Dharmasena's deliberation took aeons; with quick judgement, Llong's process might have been much shorter, though his decisions carried no weight. "Might" is the key caveat. He might have been quicker, he might have overturned Tony Hill's decision. He might have had audio that synched with a view that showed Khawaja's bat brushing his back leg.

Or he might not. More replays will help with some reviews, but the real answer to the ongoing DRS debacles is better interpretation of what the third umpire already has. Dharmasena saw what every television viewer watching the match around the world saw: nothing on Hot Spot, no apparent deviation. A noise, yes, but isolating the source of sounds is maddeningly difficult.

Hot Spot is not infallible, of course. It can detect edges but not misses, and very faint tickles can fail to show up. The DRS has a built-in benefit of the doubt that goes not to the batsman but to the on-field call. But the combination of absent factors should have led Dharmasena to be guided by the raw vision, which seemed to suggest the ball passed Khawaja's bat untouched. It is possible to see how Dharmasena reached his conclusion, but impossible to accept that this is the best cricket can offer. 

The DRS is supposed to grant a bit of justice to teams that are the victims on-field howlers by the umpires. That much is laudable. But the third umpires in this Ashes series seem to be interpreting their role differently to what we have seen in the past, and it is much more difficult to get an on-field decision overturned, even when it is wrong. One of cricket's guiding principles, that the benefit of the doubt goes in favour of the batsman seems to have gone out the window somewhere in Dubai.

Usman Khawaja got the wrong end of the stick last night, or in Ocker parlance, the raw prawn. The ICC needs to go back to the drawing board with the UDRS before it becomes a complete and utter laughing stock.