Sports Letter: Fast forward for video

Sir: Henry Blofeld's case 'Time for the video umpire' (12 February) seems to me unanswerable. If, as we often proclaim, the rules are the rules and as such an absolute standard to which all players must conform, why do we so often amend this to 'the rules are whatever you can get away with before a given umpire on a given afternoon'?

Here, as elsewhere, the Americans are 50 years or more ahead of us. A J Liebling, in The Road Back To Paris, mentions a Lt Scholl, USAF, stationed at a World War II airfield in Tunisia: 'He was the fellow who, in the Cornell-Dartmouth football game of 1940, threw the famous fifth-down touchdown pass for Cornell, the one that was completed for what was considered a Cornell victory until movies of the game showed that it shouldn't have been Cornell's ball at all and the decision had to be reversed.'

Perhaps by the end of the century the Test-playing countries could also recognise the existence of photographic or electronic evidence?

Yours faithfully,

SEBASTIAN ROBINSON

Glasgow

12 February