The technology question

Srinivas Bhogle shares his thoughts on why he thinks cricket will benefit with more technological initiations - UDRS being a case in point.

To prepare for this article I googled: ‘Cricket technology’. I found a lot of links, with the most recent links debating the vexing Umpire Decision Referral System (UDRS). In particular, I found a rather nice article in the Wall Street Journal

We’ve talked about UDRS before; my view is that we must implement UDRS in every country, for every international game, and not restrict the number of disallowed referrals to 2. I was present at MCG on the first day of the recent Ashes Boxing Day Test and realized that a UDRS referral is a moment of high cricketing drama. We must have more referrals: they heighten drama and take us closer to cricketing truth.

Technology officially ‘entered’ the cricket ground in a 1992 South Africa-India Test match at Durban when Sachin Tendulkar was declared run out based on TV replays (incidentally, Tendulkar walked after seeing a green light; later, the colour for ‘out’ would turn red).

For a long time thereafter, the ‘third umpire’ was used to judge line decisions (run outs, no balls, touching boundary rope etc.) and there is little doubt that TV replays indeed improved the quality of cricketing decisions. In fact, we wonder today how umpires in the past could be so gimlet-eyed and nimble-footed to get so many of their line decisions right.

It is quite like today’s doctors. Legend has it that Dr BC Roy only needed to check the pulse to diagnose Jawaharlal Nehru’s illness. Today’s doctors would have sent Nehru for every conceivable test and scan before pronouncing their verdict!

Indeed one of ICC’s more curious arguments against the full-blown implementation of UDRS is that the influx of technology will dull the umpire’s skills. I find this amusing. Have they considered how many matches may have been lost because of Steve Bucknor’s diminishing skills?

If we look at technology, we can further distinguish between, what we may call, ‘see-it-better’ versus ‘approximate-it-better’ approaches. Hot Spot, which uses an infra-red imaging system, is an example of ‘see-it-better’; Hawk-Eye, which uses a math model to determine the most likely future path of the cricket ball, is an example of ‘approximate-it-better’.

Naively speaking, you expect better results from Hot Spot. But you can’t be really sure! In the same Ashes Test at Melbourne, Ricky Ponting lost his cool because he thought the hot spot on Kevin Pietersen’s bat was made by the ball … actually it was Pietersen’s pad that created the hot spot. I have similarly wondered if the Hawk-Eye model can recognize whether a ball has pitched on a ‘low-bounce’ spot on the pitch … although you do expect good models to have feedback systems that can help recognize and identify the variable bounce spots.

All this leads one (e.g., MS Dhoni) to suspect that UDRS is unreliable. I find the argument of ‘100% or nothing’ to be excessively naïve. We live in an imperfect world and need to recognize that 100% accuracy is often an unattainable ideal. The best we can do is to accept that 97% accuracy is better than 93% accuracy and, therefore, embrace UDRS.

I would like to end by commenting on popular mindsets. Even today we tend to associate ‘technology’ with hardware … with devices that you can ‘see’ and ‘touch’. How many of us would acknowledge that the Duckworth-Lewis method too is a fine example of application of technology to cricket? As indeed all that wonderful imagery and graphics featuring Manhattans, bugs and Castrol worms? If you think about it, even the development of cricket bats that send a mishit soaring over the boundary ropes is a technology application! But let’s talk of Yusuf Pathan’s prowess some other day … perhaps on the day we win the 2011 World Cup.