The 2008 Sydney Test between Australia and India is remembered as one of the most controversially umpired matches in history, with Steve Bucknor at the centre of it all. His string of incorrect decisions — almost all going against India — was so consistently wrong that it transcended outrage and entered the realm of dark comedy. It was as if someone had programmed a computer to make incorrect decisions and then given it a white coat and an umpire's hat.
Bucknor gave Andrew Symonds not out when he appeared to have edged to the keeper (the replay showed a clear edge), gave Rahul Dravid out caught when replays suggested the ball hadn't carried, and made several other decisions that had Indian fans pulling their hair out in clumps. Each incorrect decision was met with increasing incredulity, as if Bucknor was engaged in a private competition to see how many wrong decisions he could fit into a single match.
The cumulative effect was so one-sided that commentators ran out of diplomatic ways to say "that was wrong." They resorted to increasingly creative euphemisms: "the replays suggest otherwise," "that's a tough call," "Bucknor may want another look at that" — all of which were polite ways of saying "the umpire has lost the plot."
The Indian cricket board formally requested that Bucknor be removed from the rest of the series, which the ICC reluctantly agreed to in an unprecedented move. Social media (in its early days) exploded with Bucknor memes and jokes. One popular joke suggested Bucknor needed to visit an optician, while another suggested he was actually an Australian undercover agent. Despite the controversy, Bucknor had been one of cricket's most respected umpires for decades — but Sydney 2008 became the defining memory of his career, and not in the way he would have wanted.