Tennis player and Davis Cup winner
Gaurav Natekar:
I have come across such situations many times. But one of the incidents I recall vaguely was some eight to ten years back. It was the Davis Cup in Brazil, and there were a lot of wrong calls. Even the audiences were behaving unruly there.

You feel wronged but then it is all a part of the game. It keeps on happening when the referees misjudge the matches but there is little you can do about it. It is a little bit complicated to explain what really goes wrong. You can't really go and appeal against it, unless you have something really concrete.

Anil Deshpande,
former player and coach, Deccan XI football Club
It is pointless to point fingers. Everyone makes mistakes. There should be laws that have to be set that keep the umpires in check. The mentality of the umpires has to be changed and the umpires need to take the arguments made by the players seriously and not dismiss them off. We have appealed to the Pune District Football Association for better umpires often. Another major problem is the rash play by members of the other teams against which most umpires never take any action. The rule of the offside is also quite ambiguous.

Manoj Pingle, boxer who represented
India in Olympics 1988:
At the international stage, India has no strong official backing and Olympics being a large platform, representatives are scared to object to even obvious mistakes. During the finals of Olympics 1988, I was subjected to foul play by the referee who allowed my Mexican opponent to dole out wrong punches. After three bad punches the umpire was supposed to warn my opponent but he did not and the game was not won fairly. I was away by just a single point and this led to my losing the gold medal. Losing the Olympics gold was a huge loss for me and for India. If this happened to me at the Olympics, it is obviously very prevalent in national and state level games. Umpires are also known to support players who belong to the same countries as them.

Smita Yadav, the women's team manager, a former rower and India's first women rowing umpire.Also the winner of the prestigious Dhyan Chand award in 2003:

Sometimes foul umpiring does happen. In my game, there is no third umpire so the odds of making a mistake are higher. And it is annoying when it happens over and over again. With a photo finish, there are chances of a manual error as no one is hundred percent perfect. The players can protest against it though. Especially in cricket, the players should ask for a change of umpires if they feel the verdict was biased or unfair to ensure fair results. I remember some five or six years back, in the Open Nationals for Rowing held in Bangalore, the photo finish was not very agreeable to the players and one of the scullers had protested against the decision of the umpires. At times the finish line is not perfectly perpendicular, which is to say that it is at a slight angle to the horizontal. Hence some players, approaching it from one side may feel that they crossed it first but that might not be the case. It is just due to the tilt in the finish line. In rowing, it also depends upon the number of lanes one has to cover. There is a technical committee to regulate the standards along with the jury that makes the final decision, but you can never totally do away with errors.

Tennis referee Sheetal Iyer, who was nominated as the neutral referee by the International Tennis Federation (ITF) for the Asia Oceania Group II tie between Pacific Islands and Pakistan held at Apia:

In my time as a referee, I have not encountered it and I try to judge all the matches i preside over very judiciously. So, I have not yet had any experience of an imbalanced judgment. But when it does happen, I do not think it is fair on the players. The players do get upset but they eventually move on and continue playing.