Friday, March 1, 2002 Much of cricket history can be seen as a progression from the amateur to the professional. It happened with the players, then the coaches, and lately even the administrators. Today, the tide of professionalism has reached the officials. It's goodbye and thank you to the 20 genial old things who have given part of their time to act as match referee, catch some sun, measure the logos on the players' bats, get to know the third umpire very well, and occasionally dish out a fine. And it's hello to cricket's first five full-time refs - Ranjan Madugalle, Clive Lloyd, Mike Procter, Gundappa Viswanath and Wasim Raja.

The new system is not a response to the Mike Denness affair, which blew up after the wheels had already been set in motion. But its aftershock can certainly be felt. Three of the five are from the subcontinent, only one has white skin, and none is from England or Australia. (The ECB more or less guaranteed that there would be no Englishman when they nominated Denness.) The persistent complaint about the disciplinary system - that it has tended to be too Anglo-Saxon - has been taken on board, and the whiff of Oxbridge has vanished in a blast of air-freshener. It will be difficult for Jagmohan Dalmiya, or anyone else, to accuse these refs of racism. And the way has been left open for England and Australia to be well-represented among the eight full-time umpires, who will be announced next week.

The trouble with the old system was that players never knew at the start of a series whether they were getting a martinet or a marshmallow. The new structure has far more chance of achieving some consistency. But as with the Test Championship, you wonder if ICC has got the numbers right. ICC's decision to pack the all-play-all championship into five years means that there have to be about 54 Tests a year. Quite often three and sometimes four Tests take place at the same time. The five refs will collect prodigious numbers of frequent-flyer points. Soon talk of player burn-out will give way to talk of ref burn-out.

Just as significantly, the five will hardly see each other. The consistency will have to come from the centre, which means Madugalle - the youngest of the five at 42, and the least experienced as a player, although highly regarded as a ref - will need to be an authoritative and dynamic boss. He can expect to send a lot of emails.

The average age of the five is 51. This sounds high, given that many of those they will be presiding over will be half that. But ICC is rather chuffed about it, pointing out that the previous panel had an average age of 61. That's cricket for you: a world where 51 is on the young side.

The initiative deserves to work. The fact that Mike Brearley has been drafted in to advise the panel on handling stress at their seminar in Cape Town later this month suggests that the hierarchy is becoming more imaginative. Whether these five are the right five we will discover. Procter and Lloyd are representatives of that familiar breed, the great player who struggles to find his niche in retirement: neither was a very effective national coach, and Procter's TV commentary is as plodding as his cricket was thrilling. But referees are allowed to plod, as long as they plod firmly and fairly. And neither of them is a man to mess with.

Vishy is popular enough to ride the inevitable mutterings about being the brother-in-law of the man in charge of the whole process, ICC's chairman of cricket Sunil Gavaskar. Wasim Raja is a relatively unknown quantity, a Pakistani whose close connections with England have put him rather in a world of his own. It could be conducive to the Olympian detachment these men will need. The Laws of the game were recently expanded to include a definition of the spirit of cricket. It ought to be up to the captains to make sure their players live up to that. In practice, it is up to these five.

Tim de Lisle is editor of Wisden.com

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