DRS: finally, a test and some common sense

With perfection being an unrealistic ambition, the idea is to get as many decisions right as possible, and eliminate the howlers.

August 26, 2015 12:05 am | Updated March 25, 2016 12:17 pm IST

The Board of Control for Cricket in India seems to be softening its stand on the Decision Review System (DRS). This is good news — as is the fact that the International Cricket Council is finally getting the DRS tested by an independent body.

 Skipper Virat Kohli spoke recently of discussing DRS among players, and more pertinently, Anurag Thakur, BCCI Secretary, suggested that India might “exclude the lbw decisions and adapt the DRS without it.”

Healthy compromise  That might be a healthy compromise, for it is the ball-tracking used for lbw decisions that is the system’s least reliable part. The ICC put the cart before the horse by insisting on the DRS without proper testing, while the BCCI refused to accept it since it was not one hundred per cent accurate. The Indian board’s uncompromising stand might have led to the first proper testing of the accuracy of the DRS at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Anil Kumble, Chairman of the ICC’s Cricket Committee, is happy things are now on track. He and Geoff Allardice, General Manager, Cricket, had discussions with the engineers at MIT.

“What we want to understand, as the system moves towards total reliability, is how it functions under extreme conditions, and what variables affect it,” says Kumble. MIT is focusing on ball-tracking and edge-detection.

Perfection was always an unrealistic ambition. To mechanically predict the accurate behaviour of a ball with its varying speed, spin, swing, torque, flight, changing shape, in different weather and pitch conditions is impossible, and maybe even unnecessary. The idea is to get as many decisions right as possible, and eliminate the howlers.

 Two years ago, Paul Hawkins, who developed Hawk-Eye, made a startling statement. “What cricket hasn’t done,” he said, “is test anything.” By then the ball-tracking system had been in use in international cricket for five years!

Power of TV  Uncertainty is built into cricket. When a portion of the cricket ball is shown clipping the leg stump, is the decision always right? Yet viewers accept it without reservation. Such is the power of television. Repetition has solidified our trust in the medium. This is the fallacy of authority that technology inspires in us. Repeat uncertainties often enough and they become certainties.

 The ICC’s rush to make the DRS compulsory led to some embarrassment since it didn’t bother to take into account the pitch condition, equipment, expertise of the operators or even consistency in the placement and number of cameras.

 Ball tracking is not an exact science, despite what the television channels would like us to believe. Hawk-Eye (and other similar systems like Virtual Eye) is a statistical tool which predicts the most likely path the ball will take after pitching. At least six cameras are in use, although sometimes there are only four, thus leading to less accurate results.

A physicist will tell you that any system that is predictive is inherently flawed because you cannot tell with precision where a free particle will go when unobstructed. Hawk-Eye tells you where the ball has pitched, the rest is statistics. The greater the amount of information fed into the system, greater will be the accuracy. In England and Australia cameras take 250 pictures per second, so there is better orientation. Other countries sometimes use 50, lowering the reliability.

Important factors Accuracy also depends on factors, like ground condition, quality of the television made available to the third umpire (Daryl Harper once couldn’t make a decision because, as he said, “he couldn’t see the ball” on TV), efficiency of the technicians and umpires, height of cameras behind the bowler’s arm — some of these can be factored into the system; others fail with human fallibility.

 South Africa’s Graeme Smith was once reprieved in a Test at the Wanderers because the third umpire did not turn up the volume on his stump microphone! Australia’s Usman Khawaja was given out caught behind at Old Trafford even after the DRS showed he had not touched the ball. Australia’s Prime Minister Kevin Rudd called it “one of the worst umpiring decisions I have seen.”

 As MIT fixes some of the kinks, it will be possible to understand how the system is to be tweaked. To know, for example, how often the machines need re-calibrating in different conditions, or when a decision by the system should be overruled.

 The important thing to remember is that the elements that make up the DRS are tools of television coverage. Television is concerned with entertainment and providing drama to the viewers, not adjudication.

 Getting the decision right is the responsibility of the ICC, which knows that India have to accept the DRS to attract sponsorship. Yet, between the ICC’s casual arrogance and India’s intransigence the issue remained unresolved. Now finally, common sense has broken through.

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