Umpires? For what?

Last week my home page on FaceBook, Twitter and Orkut was filled with status updates that had only numbers. And they were all nine's. It was 9th September 2009. I am not sure of what is so special about seeing, same numbers in a sequence on your desktop and watch. If it is so exciting, people can use their settings option and change it to what ever number or date they want. The speciality of that date supposedly was it would occur only once in 100 years. Well, Who cares? I am sure even Kanye West would agree with me. If that occurrence can be applied towards recesion, everyone would be happy. As of now, it happens once every two days.

There was another set of updates which caught my eye. It was the name Fedex. 'Fedex rocks', 'Fedex delivers', 'Fedex is pregnant', etc. I checked finance websites to see Fedex's earnings. There were none. Then google told me it was linked with Federer, the tennis player. Like I have said before, me and sports are like what the Toyota Corolla is to cars. No matter how hard it or I try, both will always remain very separate entities. Later I asked wiki and it told me, he was supposed to be Schumacher of Tennis. I had no clue. The last Tennis player I had heard of was Pete Sampras.

Over the last weekend the coverage became more extensive, especially with the controversies. Apparently one of the players had very high blood pressure, more than that of my dead grandfather. She gets mad even if the opponent player shows up. Yes, I am talking about Serena "I can't control my temper" WIlliams. She blasted the lines woman so bad, that she had to run to the umpire for cover. Her attitude and Hummer like build more than qualifies her to enter WWE, and give the Indian Singh a run for his money.

A few days back I decided to see the men's final as the whole world was watching it. It was between the Fedex guy and another one who looked like the Wolverine guy from X-Men (especially with his weird beard). During the course of the match, Federer also had confrontations with the umpire. Wolverine claimed he did not get his package overnight, as promised. Fedex denied saying, he cant complain about it a decade after it has happened. Federer made the umpire feel like a Russian. For new readers, that means an idiot.

The match was very interesting as it was pretty close between them. Even though I didn't know Federer, I wanted him to win. Just because rest of the world wanted him to. Even after his confrontation with the umpire, I felt he was right and the rules needed to change. As a challenge can be used to reduce the momentum of a player. Towards the end Federer seemed to have given up. And Wolverine won the match. Later I came to know Wolverine actually had a long name. Juan Martin del Potro. He is as tall as the Eiffel Tower and is as old as my newest underwear. Twenty years! Now that's an achievement. I on the other hand at that age, was as clueless about my future, as George Bush.

The problem lies with the umpires and the rules. The rules shouldn't have any loop holes and followed strictly. On the other hand it shouldn't change every hour like F1 too. The rate at which teams are quitting F1, there will be only Force India left on the grid. Coming to umpires. These people are made to enforce the rules of the game. And at times they take wrong decisions. But now, technology has improved so much that with the live videos they can pin point exactly what happened. This leaves hardly any margin for error.

So why are these people making decisions when they know the guy in the video monitoring room can do it? It's high time that someone changes the job description for the umpires on the field. It should reduce to merely communicating what the video guy says. At least the conflicts would reduce. But Federer might still question the decision. Or the Umpires who make wrong decisions should be fired. In which case, they would always ask the third umpire just to make sure.

At the end of Monday's match I found out why exactly Federer had lost. That was the only way he could avoid one of the final prizes. A Lexus!