The agreement between the England Cricket Board and the Board of Control for Cricket in India for the Test series in England in July and August 2011 was that lbw appeals would not be reviewed. The Indians didn't trust that the path of the ball after impact as predicted by the Decision Review System offered a reliable and accurate interpretation of whether the stumps would be hit.
They couldn't do much about the entire system being deployed during ICC events, but they tried to impose conditions in their bilateral series. Because of India's financial clout, their demands were usually met.
That arrangement remained in place until England's tour to India in November and December 2016, when the BCCI allowed all components of DRS to be deployed "on a trial basis" to "evaluate the improvements made" to the system. India won the five-match rubber 4-0, which lowered the volume of their board's opposition to electronic umpiring.
An hour after tea on the second day at Trent Bridge in that 2011 Test, Stuart Broad loped languidly towards Marais Erasmus' end. A flat-footed MS Dhoni drove expansively at the third delivery of the over, and steered a simple catch to James Anderson at second slip. Harbhajan Singh came in, and pushed forward unconvincingly to a delivery pitched on off and middle that seamed inward a touch. The ball crashed into the front pad. England's players went up. So did Erasmus' finger.
Harbhajan threw his head back in anger and then pointed to his bat while venting to his partner, Rahul Dravid. Sure enough, replays showed the ball had taken a healthy edge before hitting the pad. Had DRS been fully available, the error could have been undone.
"It was farcical that catches but not lbws could be reviewed," Erasmus says. "There were other inconsistencies during that period. Some countries' boards wouldn't pay for DRS, so we played certain Test matches with no DRS and the next one with DRS. We might play a Test with DRS in Zimbabwe with eight cameras, and play one in England with 30 cameras and all the bells and whistles. It was ludicrous to have to deal with such inconsistency but it was the start of the DRS era and it took a while before everybody bought into it, especially India." To the Indians' cost, as Harbhajan's fate proved.
In walked Praveen Kumar to face the hat-trick ball, which snuck between bat and pad and nailed the top of off stump. Among those amid the thousands present who stood to applaud was Ian Botham, who despite all his heroics never took a Test hat-trick.
India had five wickets remaining and led by 52 when Broad began his raid. They lost all of those wickets in 23 deliveries and added only 15. What should have been a healthy advantage was stunted to just 67 runs. Nottinghamshire's own Broad took 6 for 46, which had his home crowd singing one of their favourite songs: "He's big, he's bad, he's better than his dad…"
Chris Broad, Stuart's father, played 25 Tests and 34 ODIs for England from June 1984 to June 1989. He became more prominent in the global game as a match referee, serving in 123 men's Tests and 361 ODIs, and in 153 men's and women's T20Is. One of the men's T20Is was between South Africa and Australia at the Wanderers in February 2006 - Erasmus' debut as an international umpire.
In all, Erasmus and Broad worked together on 29 internationals. Erasmus was the television umpire in ten of them, when he and Broad would have been in particularly close quarters. Broad is unusually direct for an Englishman, which was part of the reason why he and the South African developed a rapport that grew into friendship.
There was nothing untoward about Broad inviting the officials to his Nottingham home for dinner on the evening after the second day of that 2011 Test. Stuart would not be present, and as the match involved England, Chris was not the match referee.
Ranjan Madugalle, the match referee, had tasked Erasmus, as a wine-wise Swartlander, with procuring some of the good stuff to take to Broad's house to show appreciation for the invitation, which Erasmus did. But the hat-trick, specifically the circumstances of its second element, might have changed the optics of the situation. Had there been optics…
"I walked through Chris' front door holding up two bottles of wine," Erasmus says. "Afterwards I thought, 'Imagine if someone from some newspaper or television channel was looking for Stuart and went to his father's house, and saw me walking in in a celebratory mood.' When we sat down for dinner that evening, Chris did toast me for getting Stuart a hat-trick. The little bastard!" Chris Broad is 1.93 metres tall. Whatever else he is or isn't, he is not little.
Many would be surprised to learn that umpires enjoy an evening tipple during Tests. But they tend to be over the age of 40 by the time they make the Elite Panel. Those who drink are unlikely to have reached that level if they aren't able to responsibly and effectively police their own alcohol intake. Sadly, there have been exceptions. More happily, they are just that: exceptions.
This is an edited extract from Marais Erasmus: The Rock 'n Roll Years; Cricket in an Umpire's Orbit by Telford Vice, Naledi