All three umpires officiating in a Test match being Asians

In the fifth Ashes Test at The Oval all three umpires (on-field umpires and television) were Asians — Aleem Dar, Kumar Dharmasena and S Ravi (third umpire). Bharath Seervi lists Tests where all three officiating umpires were from Asia.

Apart from being the farewell Test for Michael Clarke and Chris Rogers, the final Test of Ashes 2015 at The Oval witnessed an event that had never happened in the past. The two on-field umpires for the Test were Aleem Dar of Pakistan and Kumar Dharmasena of Sri Lanka while India’s S Ravi was third umpire. There have been Tests where all the three officiating umpires were Asians but this was the first time that three Asians officiated in a Test involving two non-Asian teams.

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In the past, there have been 27 Tests where both on-field umpires and the third umpire were from Asia, but every Test involved at least one Asian team. This is surely a milestone for subcontinent umpires — for this happened in an Ashes contest.

Let us list the Tests where all three officiating umpires were Asians. In Tests involving Asian countries there are many instances of both on-field umpires being from the subcontinent but a set of three has been rare. In fact, The Oval Test is the first instance in eight years of three Asians officiating in the same Test. The last occasion was at Kandy between Sri Lanka and England in December 2007, where on-field umpires were Aleem Dar and Asad Rauf (both Pakistan) and the third umpire was Tyron Wijewardene (Sri Lanka). The table below lists all such instances in detail.

All three umpires officiating in a Test match being Asians

It is also a rare instance, where the three officials were one each from India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka (the top three Asian countries), something that happened only once before — between Sri Lanka and Bangladesh at SSC in 2007. The on-field umpires were Asad Rauf from Pakistan and Suresh Shastri from India, and the third umpire was Tyron Wijewardene from Sri Lanka.

Third umpires were introduced only in 1992. Hence there are no possible instances before that.

(Bharath Seervi is a cricket statistician who is obsessed with digging numbers, facts and records related to the game. An active member of Society of Cricket Statisticians of India, he blogs at www.cricketseervistats.blogspot.com. He can be followed on Twitter at @SeerviBharath and on Facebook here)