The respect which used to be accorded to umpires has not, however, been undermined by cricketers in the main, as the Test umpires recently lamented. Appealing is excessive, but it is mild compared to what often happened in the 1980s, before the International Cricket Council introduced one neutral umpire for each Test match.

Before then, certain Test teams - excluding England - used to storm the umpire like paratroopers even if the players knew the batsman was not out. If the umpire rejected their appeal, certain Test teams - especially England - would flounce and sulk like adolescents who have been told they are not going to be allowed out tonight.

It is television, principally, which is now making the umpires' job impossible, specifically a box of tricks no bigger than a bible called a live slow motion machine, produced by the Belgian company EVS. With it, a technician can train a lens in order to highlight a controversial incident within a minute of its taking place.

A prime example occurred yesterday when Mike Atherton was given lbw by Javed Akhtar, of Pakistan. Shortly afterwards, there on television was the lens highlighting the fact that Atherton had got an inside edge before the ball struck his pad.

This series against South Africa may have seen more umpiring misjudgments than normal, or fewer. The point is that the misjudgments which have been made have been there for all the world to see in the closest detail as this is the first summer in which the BBC have used the EVS machine regularly, while Sky are in their third year of it.

For all the world to see, that is, except the umpires, who have to reach their conclusion on the basis of what they perceive and hear from their solitary point of view (whether the bowler's umpire should consult with his square-leg colleague about the height of lbws, a sensible suggestion, is a separate matter). Professions used to possess a mystique because their practitioners had their own esoteric knowledge; now umpires are less informed than anyone.

Last week, the University of Cape Town's Sports Department offered to supply the technology to adjudicate on lbw decisions (for a fee). There will be no limit to these developments - a device to judge no-balls for over-stepping, another to decide whether the ball touched the bat - which was entirely foreseeable when Pandora's Box was opened and umpires were first told to consult something other than their own eyes, ears and experience.

Yet it is still not too late, not quite, for the ICC to stop this downward spiral which will no doubt end in umpires being nothing more than cardboard cut-outs in white coats, using no initiative of their own and taking their orders from experts consulting a bank of telvision monitors.

As a general principle, it is highly desirable that limited-overs cricket should be kept as distinct as possible in everybody's mind from first-class and Test cricket. So it should be in the domain of umpiring too. In one-day internationals let every technological aid be used in the administration of justice, and none whatsoever in Test matches.

Thus, in a one-day international, played in coloured clothes as they all will soon be, the umpire - the one in the middle - would be able to consult the replays on the same screen as everybody else in the ground before he comes to his decision. The delay would add time to the proceedings, but at least it would be a dramatic, or at any rate interesting, delay. In Test matches, on the other hand, the umpiring would return to what it used to be and contain the same element of human error as the cricket of the players themselves.

However (a large proviso), only the finest half-dozen umpires in the world should be allowed to stand in Test matches. An umpire flown in from some distant land, often out of his cricket season, is not acceptable simply because he is neutral. During this Headingley Test, some of the decision-making by Mr Akhtar has been too quixotic for a series-deciding match.

National Grid's International Panel must consist only of the best, who can keep the human errors down to a tolerable minimum. For we are all umpires now, and owing to ever more advances in television, highly critical ones too.