Television killed the umpiring star

Kartikeya Date in Cricinfo

At its annual general meeting in July, the ICC decided to reduce the margin of the umpire's-call element in the Decision Review System. The old rule required that at least 50% of the ball must be hitting at least 50% of a stump in the estimate provided by the ball-tracking model. The change, which comes into effect this month, now requires at least 50% of the ball to be hitting any part of a stump, or, as the ICC phrased it: "The size of the zone inside which half the ball needs to hit for a Not Out decision to be reversed to Out will increase, changing to a zone bordered by the outside of off and leg stumps, and the bottom of the bails (formerly the centre of off and leg stumps, and the bottom of the bails)."




The umpire's call has traditionally invited the scorn of a number of prominent players as well as commentators. The rule change is a victory for the view that umpire's call is excessively deferential to the umpire. In this essay, which extends ideas I have written about previously, I consider what this change says about the past, present and future of umpiring.

****

Contradictions abound with the DRS. It was invented, according to the ICC, to correct obvious umpiring mistakes. But it is used most frequently to litigate on marginal umpiring decisions. The purpose of the player review was to allow players to question umpiring decisions where they knew the umpires had got it wrong. Yet players routinely use the review speculatively, to see if they can get a marginal reversal. The DRS was invented because umpires were deemed to be experts who made clear (or obvious) mistakes from time to time. It was not intended to make up for any perceived shortcoming in an umpire's expertise. It was intended to make up for the human tendency to make mistakes in real time. This distinction is important.

If an umpire lacked expertise, then no matter how many times he or she saw a particular lbw appeal, the right decision would not be reliably reached. But if an umpire simply made a mistake in real time, it would be recognised on replay. As an analogy, think of the times where you have made a mistake adding up two numbers. This is a mistake. It does not occur because you don't know the correct way to add two numbers. If you didn't know how to add, no matter how many times you looked at the problem, you wouldn't know how to reliably calculate the correct answer.

The DRS was not intended to make up for any perceived shortcoming in an umpire's expertise

Not only is the DRS only rarely used for this kind of correction, the process used to identify mistakes - the player review - fails about 75% of the time. At the 2015 World Cup, 583 umpiring decisions were made (including 312 lbw and 229 catches): an umpiring decision is made any time an umpire answers an appeal, so not all dismissals involve umpiring decisions and nor do all umpiring decisions result in dismissals. Eighty-four were reviewed and only 20 of those were successful; 57 reviews were for lbw appeals, of which only eight were successful. According to data provided by the ICC, in all international cricket between April 2013 and March 2016 in which the DRS was used, one in six umpiring decisions was reviewed by players. Three out of four player reviews failed. Umpiring decisions on lbw appeals were reviewed more frequently - about one in every four. Four out of five such reviews were unsuccessful.

Many players, as well as TV commentators, often betray a misunderstanding about the DRS, beginning with the basic question of what it is. In cricket the umpire can choose between two options when answering an appeal - out and not out. The DRS is a system for reviewing the umpire's answer. It is not a system for providing a new answer to the original appeal by setting aside the umpire's first answer.

The DRS is also frequently the catch-all term for the suite of technologies used within the review system, technologies that are also not well understood. The most widespread misunderstanding is about ball-tracking and the notion that the estimate of the path of the ball from pad to stumps is not an estimate but a statement of fact. This is particularly puzzling, since it suggests that players and commentators misunderstand the lbw law. A leg-before decision is built on the umpire hypothesising about an event that never occurs, that never occurred and never will occur.

----Also read

Abolish the LBW - it has no place in the modern world

----

The question that must be answered on an lbw appeal is: "Had the pad not been in the way, would the ball have gone on to hit the stumps?" The answer to this question is not knowable in the same way as the answer to "Did the ball touch the edge of the bat?" In the case of an edge, the event occurs. The DRS includes technologies that enable an answer to this inquiry. No comparable data can possibly be available in the case of lbw. The estimate of the ball-tracker is just that: an estimate. This is why marginal cases, where the estimate contends that the ball is clipping the stumps, are classified as umpire's call. The probability of an estimate being wrong by an inch is exponentially lower than it being wrong by a quarter of an inch. The point of umpire's call is simply to ensure that only those decisions that can be refuted should be overturned. All other decisions should be allowed to stand.

The rise of the DRS is tied in to the way the authority of the umpires has been undermined by players and broadcasters over the years Cameron Spencer / © Getty Images

Yet, even Kumar Sangakkara evidently misses this point. Perhaps he was caught up in the disappointment of the moment - his former team-mates had just been denied an lbw thanks to a review by the England batsman when he tweeted: "High time the ICC got rid of this umpires [sic] call. If the ball is hitting the stumps it should be out on review regardless of umps decision." Later he added: "is a feather of a nick marginal if it doesn't show up on hotspot but only on snicko? Then why use technology." Sangakkara is not alone in misunderstanding that when an lbw review returns umpire's call, the ball-tracking estimate is telling us: "This may go on to hit the stumps, but it cannot be said with sufficient certainty."

Now it is true that what the ball-tracking companies consider to be sufficient certainty and what the ICC considers to be so is not the same thing. Different providers use different methods for predicting the ball's path. They are also not equally confident about the reliability of the predictions. Ian Taylor, the head of Virtual Eye, has previously suggested that TV umpires be given an override switch that allows them to ignore the ball-tracking estimate in certain circumstances. Paul Hawkins, of Hawk-Eye Innovations, is far more confident of his company's ball-tracking predictions.

But if we take the criticisms of Sangakkara, and Shane Warne and Ian Botham among others, to their logical conclusion, then by eliminating the umpire's call, and with it the idea of the marginal decision itself, there is no longer any need for the umpire. If the review is for the appeal and not the decision, then why is the decision necessary in the first place? Why make umpires stand in the sun for six hours if their expert judgement, from the best position in the house, is not needed?

Why not use only DRS technologies instead of an umpire? Almost every single thing the umpire does on the field can now be done from beyond the boundary. The umpires could sit in a nice air-conditioned office in the pavilion with a dazzling array of screens and controls. They could even operate the electronic scoreboard from there, instead of signalling boundaries and extras to the scorers.

A leg-before decision is built on the umpire hypothesising about an event that never occurs, that never occurred and never will occur

One practical answer is that these technologies are expensive. We will still need umpires at the lower levels. But without the incentive of being able to become an international umpire, what might happen to the quality of umpiring at the lower levels?

As a scientific matter, if one is to consider replacing the umpire with such technologies then the responsible thing to do is to consider two kinds of error. First is the margin of error of the technology itself. Take the ball-tracker. The amount of information available for each delivery is not exactly the same. For instance, the faster the delivery, the fewer the number of frames of video available from which the path of the ball can be traced. And because the same amount of data is not available for each delivery, all projected paths cannot be predicted with equal certainty.

This is not to say that most paths cannot be predicted with sufficiently little uncertainty. In an interview in 2011, Hawkins explained that the accuracy of the prediction is more binary than one might imagine. There is either sufficient data for a reliable prediction or there isn't. One example of a situation where there isn't sufficient data is for yorkers. The ball-tracking system designates any situation in which the distance between the ball's pitching point and the point of impact is less than 40cm to be an "extreme" lbw. A mistake by the ball-tracking system in an lbw review involving Shan Masood about two years ago may have been due to this condition.

Before ball-tracking, the decision against Masood could have been argued two ways - one, that the ball was very likely to miss leg stump, and the other, that Masood had moved a long way across and was hit on the back heel inside the crease. The ball did not have much to travel. This would have introduced doubt into the idea that the ball would have missed the stumps.

If we eliminate the idea of umpire's call, and with it the idea of the marginal decision itself, is there a need for the umpire?Richard Heathcote / © Getty Images

In the ball-tracking era, with the increased number of mini-decisions in the chain between the original appeal and the final decision, there are more points where people can make mistakes than before. What's more, there are more people who can make mistakes. The Masood lbw did involve operator error according to Hawk-Eye. The upshot of all this is that the cricketing question of whether or not the decision against Masood was reasonably defensible was set aside in favour of doubts about the plausibility of the ball-tracking estimate.

Hawk-Eye did once suggest visualising the confidence of each prediction by drawing an "uncertainty ellipse" around the ball. In cases where there was sufficient information to make the prediction, the ellipse showing a calculated error would be extremely close to the ball. Showing the ellipse, however minor the error might be, would continually remind viewers of two facts: first, that the animation they were watching was an estimate, and second, that the estimate was probabilistic. This was rejected by broadcasters, who preferred a "definitive" visualisation.

I am inclined to accept that the mathematical prediction models are generally reliable. As more testing is carried out, and with advances in hardware, these models will continue to improve. But even if we assume that the model is good, and its least confident prediction is still sufficiently confident, we also have to make allowances for shortcomings - those factors it is not designed to account for. I am not referring to atmospherics, or the peculiar traits of a cricket ball at different stages of its existence (the model's solution of tracking movement has an elegant way of accounting for these). Instead I refer to, for instance, the limits of video - the path of the ball from the bowler's hand to the batsman is constructed using multiple video frames from multiple tracking cameras; or the non-standard nature of cricket stadiums, which could introduce limits to the extent of calibration possible; or the difference in the quality of video available in different countries.

Every city in the world that requires the certification of building designs before construction requires that concrete structures be "over-designed" to include a factor of safety. This is usually a matter, for example, of increasing the calculated beam depth for a given span by a certain percentage. This is done to cover for uncertainties that the calculation cannot take into account. The umpire's call is similar.

****

Connoisseurs and administrators have dreamed of using technology to help umpires for decades. But the development of the DRS is not solely the result of an innocent, abstract desire to help umpiring. Its evolution is a direct consequence of the authority of the umpire being undermined by players, aided and abetted by broadcasters. It was not inevitable that technical assistance for umpiring decisions should take the form of a review initiated by players. Nor was it inevitable that the very technologies used to enhance the entertainment value of the television broadcast should become tools of adjudication.

Umpires are right to be fearful. Their authority has been systematically dismantled from the commentary box

The very design of the DRS betrays its impulses. If the point of the system were to correct obvious mistakes, why would such sophisticated technologies be necessary? Shouldn't an obvious error, by its definition, be obvious? Instead, it appears that a central impulse was to ensure that the very technologies that were used by broadcasters to litigate umpiring decisions be used in the review. Given the pressure the umpires had been placed under, it would not have been viable to use a system of reviewing decisions that did not include these technologies.

Consider now examples of the oldest form of review - requesting replays for run-out calls - to see how umpires have begun to question their own expertise. Matters have reached a stage where they reflexively draw a TV screen in the air even for the politest, mildest appeals, where it is patently clear the batsman is in. The replay often shows him well inside the crease, or even past the stumps. There are arguments to be made for being safe rather than sorry, but there are instances when umpires signal for the replay even as the batsman is walking off to the pavilion. This is motivated by fear, not caution.

And umpires are right to be fearful. Their authority has been systematically dismantled from the commentary box. To see why, we must understand the model of the TV "argument", the central feature of which is balance, not accuracy or depth or nuance (which lead to complexity, which is boring for TV).

If one person takes the position that the earth is flat, and the other that the earth is round, then a "balanced" argument treats both positions to be equally valid. Here's how it might happen during commentary. An important batsman is given not out at a crucial stage. One commentator makes an effort to explain why the decision was marginal and why it might have reasonably gone either way, that the umpire did not make a mistake. The co-commentator, either by way of "balance", or in an attempt to live up to a TV persona, responds by saying he thought it was out and the fact that it was not given is a mistake. One side concludes the earth is round. The other disagrees. If there is time, they have a "debate", which usually amounts to the two claims being restated in different ways until time runs out.

The "balanced" argument comes with the following corollary in cricket commentary - as long as an umpire is praised for getting a decision right, it is perfectly reasonable to excoriate him for getting a decision wrong. The rightness and wrongness of marginal decisions is, by definition, doubtful. But the manufactured certainty of a visualisation like the ball-tracker enables a thorough excoriation, minimising marginality. One commentator will offer the careful, nuanced live commentary. The other will see the ball-tracker depicting the ball clipping leg stump and say, "This is where umpire's call saves the batsman despite a bad original decision." Of course, if the ball-tracker shows the ball missing by a whisker, the same commentator will praise the original decision. The difference between the two stances is often no more than a fraction of an inch. There is no cricketing merit in having such divergent opinions about instances separated by fractions of an inch, but it makes for great TV; never mind that it undermines the authority of the umpire.

Under the DRS not only are there more points where people can make mistakes than before, there are more people involved in the process, who can make mistakes © Getty Images

Too many commentators seem willing to accept the idea that a decision is worth reviewing just because a player does not like it. If not, the vast number of bad player reviews would bother them at least as much as the marginal lbw decision going against their team seems to. They don't. You never hear of how consistently unsuccessful players are at reviews. That's one statistic commentators rarely track.

Their job precludes them from saying "It could reasonably have gone either way" too often. That response makes everybody but the most serious cricket fans deeply unhappy. And if only serious cricket fans watched cricket, elementary economics says that it would not interest most broadcasters. The point is not that commentators are inherently bad. That matters are not as simple as this is palpably evident from the fact that the same commentators sound different depending on the broadcaster they work for. Rather, the point is that the DRS is the product of the complex interplay of cricket and the lucrative show business of its broadcast. Commentators constitute the high-profile face of the show-business side and usually have a deep history on the cricketing side, and hence are central characters.

As conclusion, here is an idiosyncratic history of umpiring, told through three umpiring decisions and their presentation. It constitutes a prehistory of this latest change in the rules. On the fourth evening at Adelaide Oval on a day late in 1999, Sachin Tendulkar was given out lbw after ducking into a Glenn McGrath bouncer. The ball didn't rise on a wearing, pre-drop-in-era wicket. Ian Chappell and Sunil Gavaskar were on commentary, and after describing the action, Chappell said:

"Dangerous lbw decision for an umpire to give because there are so many moving parts. It's not like the batsman being hit on the pad. There's a lot of movement when the batsman's ducking like that. It's hit him up under the back of the arm. [Pauses as the ball leaves McGrath's hand and reaches Tendulkar] Oh, it's not the easiest decision to give at all. Because with all those things moving, you've got to be very sure."

Gavaskar was interested in why Tendulkar chose to duck. He pointed out that the short leg probably worried Tendulkar and made him choose not to play at the ball. Chappell and Gavaskar had been discussing, even before the appeal, how ducking was likely to be risky given the uneven bounce. There was no Hawk-Eye. But between the video and the commentary, it was clear to the viewer what had occurred. Australia had set a trap and it had worked. The decision McGrath won was bold but reasonable. It was possible to reasonably disagree with Daryl Harper, but it could not be successfully argued that he was definitely wrong.

Too many commentators seem willing to accept the idea that a decision is worth reviewing just because a player does not like it

Nearly 12 years later in Mohali, Tendulkar against Pakistan in a World Cup semi-final. In the 11th over of India's innings, Saeed Ajmal got a ball to grip and turn past Tendulkar's forward defensive. On commentary, even as Ajmal and Kamran Akmal were seized by the appeal of their cricketing lives, Sourav Ganguly's instinctive reaction was that it looked very close. Sure enough, umpire Ian Gould gave it out.

It was a perfectly reasonable decision. Any umpire who made the same decision could not be faulted. But here was a wrinkle. The ball-tracking estimate showed that the ball would have missed leg stump by what seemed to be a few angstroms. This time the intimately intertwined apparatus constituted by the umpires and the broadcast told us simply that Gould was wrong and Tendulkar was safe. Leg-before decisions were no longer reasonable judgements by human beings. Ganguly's instinctive reaction on commentary was lost amid the manufactured certainty. Cricket's broadcast no longer had time for the subtle idea that close appeals are close because they are close to being out, while close decisions are close because they are more or less equally close to being out and not out.

Four years later, during the knockout stages of the 2015 World Cup, we, the viewers, were finally allowed into the inner sanctum. While a review was in progress, instead of hearing commentators, we heard what the umpires said to each other.

"Let's look at the no-ball. Yes, that looks fine."

"May I see spin-vision when you are ready?"

"Let's see the ball-tracker when you are ready."

"Pitched outside leg."



The ICC's rulebook governing the DRS prescribed these questions. The role umpires were playing could have been played just as well if they were all sitting in a room in front of a television; in the age of the DRS, the umpire has gone from being the expert match manager to all-purpose match clerk. On its own, the change in umpire's call is not the worst idea, even if it is an unnecessary change. But it is a signal that a bad argument has won - another milestone towards the end of the umpire's expertise.

Why Hawk-Eye still cannot be trusted

Russell Jackson in Cricinfo

Imran Tahir's appeal against Martin Guptill looked straightforward but Hawk-Eye differed © AFP

Enlarge

I don't trust the data. Don't worry, this isn't another Peter Moores thinkpiece. It's Hawk-Eye or ball-tracker or whatever you want to call it. I don't trust it. I don't trust the readings it gives.

This isn't a flat-earth theory, though flat earth does come into it, I suppose. How on earth can six cameras really predict the movement of a ball (a non-perfect sphere prone to going out of shape at that) on a surface that is neither flat nor stable? A ball that's imparted with constantly changing amounts of torque, grip, flight, speed and spin, not to mention moisture.

----- Also Read

Abolish the death penalty in cricket; I mean the LBW

------

When Hawk-Eye, a prediction system with a known and well-publicised propensity for minor error (2.2 millimetres is the most recent publicly available figure) shows a fraction less than a half of the ball clipping leg stump after an lbw appeal, can we take that information on face value and make a decision based upon it?

During Tuesday's World Cup semi-final, my long-held conspiracy theory bubbled over. How, I wondered, could the ball that Imran Tahir bowled to Martin Guptill in the sixth over - the turned-down lbw shout from which the bowler called for a review - have passed as far above the stumps as the TV ball-tracker indicated? To the naked eye it looked wrong. The predicted bounce on the Hawk-Eye reading looked far too extravagant.

Worse, why upon seeing that projection did every single person in the pub I was in "ooh" and "aah" as though what they were seeing was as definitive and irrefutable an event as a ball sticking in a fieldsman's hands, or the literal rattle of ball on stumps? Have we just completely stopped questioning the authority of the technology and the data?

Later I checked the ball-by-ball commentary on ESPNcricinfo. Here's what it said: "This is a flighted legbreak, he looks to sweep it, and is beaten. Umpire Rod Tucker thinks it might be turning past the off stump. This has pitched leg, turned past the bat, hit him in front of middle, but is bouncing over, according to the Hawkeye. That has surprised everybody. That height has come into play here. It stays not-out."

Why don't we question the authority of a technology that has a well-publicised margin of error?  © Getty Images

Enlarge

It surprised me, but did it surprise everybody? Probably not. More TV viewers seemed to accept the call than question it. When you've watched enough cricket though, some things just look a little off. To me this one didn't add up. Guptill made another 28 runs, not a trifling matter in the context of the game.

A disclaimer: though I distrust it for lbw decisions, I'm not saying that Hawk-Eye is all bad. It's great for "grouping" maps to show you where certain bowlers are pitching the ball, because tracking where a ball lands is simple. What happens next I'm not so sure on, particularly when the spinners are bowling.

To be fair, Hawk-Eye's inventor Paul Hawkins was a true pioneer and has arguably made a greater contribution to the entertainment factor of watching cricket on TV than many actual players manage. That's the thing though: it's entertainment. In 2001, barely two years after Hawkins had developed the idea it had won a BAFTA for its use in Channel 4's Ashes coverage that year. It wasn't until 2008 - seven years later - that it was added as a component of the Decision Review System. Quite a lag, that.

On their website, admittedly not the place to look for frank and fearless appraisal of the technology, Hawk-Eye (now owned by Sony) claim that the fact TV viewers now expect a reading on every lbw shout is "a testimony to Hawk-Eye's reputation for accuracy and reliability". But it's not, is it? All that it really tells us is that we are lemmings who have been conditioned to accept the reading as irrefutable fact upon which an umpiring decision can be made. But it's a prediction.

Not even Hawk-Eye themselves would call it a faultless system. Last December the company admitted they had got a reading completely wrongwhen Pakistan's Shan Masood was dismissed by Trent Boult during the Dubai Test. In this instance, the use of only four cameras at the ground (Hawk-Eye requires six) resulted in the operator making an input error. Why it was even being used under those conditions is more a question for the ICC, I suppose.

It's not all bad: Hawke-Eye gives great insight into where bowlers are pitching their deliveries  © Hawk-Eye

Enlarge

The Masood debacle highlights an interesting issue with regards to the cameras though. Understandably given the pay cheques at stake and that Hawk-Eye is a valuable component of their coverage, TV commentators rarely question the readings even in cases as puzzling as the Masood verdict. Mike Haysman is one who stuck his neck out in a 2011 Supersport article. Firstly, Haysman echoed my earlier thought: "The entertainment factor was the exact reason they were originally introduced. Precise decision-making was not part of the initial creative masterplan." The technology has doubtless improved since, but the point remains.

More worryingly though, Haysman shone a light on the issue with the cameras upon which Hawk-Eye depends. At that point an Ashes Test, for instance, might have had bestowed upon it a battalion of deluxe 250 frame-per-second cameras, whereas a so-called lesser fixture might use ones that captured as few as 25 frames-per-second. Remember: the higher the frame rate the more accurate the reading. Put plainly, for the past five years the production budget of the rights holder for any given game, as well as that game's level of perceived importance, has had an impact on the reliability of Hawk-Eye readings. Absurd.

As a general rule, the more you research the technology used in DRS calls, the more you worry. In one 2013 interview about his new goal-line technology for football, Paul Hawkins decried the lack of testing the ICC had done to verify the accuracy of DRS technologies. "What cricket hasn't done as much as other sports is test anything," he started. "This [football's Goal Decision System] has been very, very heavily tested whereas cricket's hasn't really undergone any testing." Any? Then this: "It's almost like it has tested it in live conditions so they are inheriting broadcast technology rather than developing officiating technology." Does that fill you with confidence?

Hawkins and science-minded cricket fans might bray at the suggestion that Hawk-Eye can't be taken as law, but in lieu of any explanation of its formulas, machinations and the way it's operated (also known as proprietary information) it's hard for some of us to shake the doubt that what we're seeing with our eyes differs significantly from the reading of a computer.

Why the BCCI won't be swayed by Richardson's DRS claims

The ICC's CEO hopes to get India on board and backing the review system, but that doesn't look likely to happen

Martin Crowe in Cricinfo

March 24, 2014

 

How can there be a zone of certainty for something that never happened? © BCCI

David Richardson, the CEO of the ICC, runs world cricket from an executive position. He also set up and designed the one and only DRS, which is sometimes nicknamed the David Richardson System.

The roots of this experiment with technology date back to 2007, when Richardson was the ICC's general manager. Following the awful Monkeygate controversy in Sydney in 2008, when umpiring howlers dominated a nasty contest between Australia and India, Richardson fast-tracked the DRS to avoid any further outcry for technology to help the umpires in the middle. It made sense; umpiring mistakes followed by copious replays, enabled by technology, of those mistakes, were killing the spirit of the game. That nasty series was the watershed. Enough was enough.

In mid-2009, the launch of Richardson's system was hastily arranged in time for the Sri Lanka v India series. For some reason they chose not to use the highly credible Hawk-Eye technology and instead went with a rookie rival, Animated Research Limited, a New Zealand-based operation. The result was a disaster. The details are well documented. The upshot was that India, rightly, condemned the predictive path used, and the conditions of the player challenge.

Since that ill-fated start in Sri Lanka, the DRS has spluttered along, accompanied by a mixture of embarrassment and the inevitable spin that all is well. Apparently, according to Richardson himself, the percentage of correct decisions has risen, but that is going by the rules of the system itself, which, with its "zones of certainty" concept, offers flawed predictions. Hardly an accurate measure for basing statistics on. Overall, the system has lacked credibility, and the BCCI has been the only one to consistently point this out.

Last week, however Richardson seemed to pre-empt a BCCI about-turn, based on his convincing former India captain Anil Kumble, who is on the ICC's technical committee, and also the upcoming appointment of N Srinivasan as ICC chairman. Kumble, who was critical of the DRS back when it first appeared is now seen as an easy pushover, ensuring that Richardson finally gets full global approval for the system.

Kumble is an independent, astute, balanced, outstanding man and player, well respected in the world game. I had the privilege of working with him in 2008, in the first IPL, and over the next few years on the MCC World Committee. Without question, he will be true to his beliefs. As for Srinivasan, nothing seems to faze him, and his opposition to the system has been unyielding.

Two things stand out. Firstly, it is inconceivable that Kumble, or the BCCI, will buckle. Secondly, the system is so flawed that the only long-term solution is to bin the dog's breakfast it is, and start from scratch.

The flaws have been well debated. The predictive path is never going to be bulletproof, and it often shows trajectories significantly different to those that would have come to pass. After all, the system is operated by humans.

The player-challenge rules are ridiculous, with two gambling chips offered for either side, slowing the game down and continually disrespecting the umpires' ability.

	The player-challenge rules are ridiculous, with two gambling chips offered for either side, slowing the game down and continually disrespecting the umpires' ability

Take a look at an imaginary scenario, of the sort often seen in Tests now (although not necessarily off consecutive balls as described below).

A batsman is hit on the pad and is given out. Knowing it's a 50-50 call, that he is a key batsman, and that his team has two unsuccessful challenges, he decides to review. The ball-tracking predictive path shows the ball clipping the leg stump by a whisker, so with the benefit going to the umpire, and not the batsman, the lbw is upheld. The batsman walks off convinced there was doubt about might have happened. He's convinced if the DRS wasn't in use, he would have been given the benefit of doubt, so he rues the system. The umpire himself learns that it only just clipped the top of the leg stump. He is relieved, yet also perhaps startled at how close it was, and put in two minds, remembering that in the pre-DRS days, it was the batsman who usually got the benefit of any doubt.

With the next ball, the new batsman receives the same delivery. He is hit on the pads, and this time, after much rumination, is given not out by the same umpire. The fielding captain, knowing it's 50-50 and that he has two unsuccessful challenges left, decides to review. The predictive path shows the ball just clipping the leg stump, not inside the "zone of certainty", so the review is turned down, the batsman and the umpire getting the benefit, the fielding side losing a challenge. The batsman previously given out is watching in the dressing room as he undoes his pads. He's fuming.

Next ball, there is another shout for lbw. Again, it looks similar to the one before, so the umpire gives it not out. The fielding captain, knowing he has one unsuccessful challenge left, decides that again it's worth the gamble to remove this key new batsman, so calls for another review. The predictive path shows the ball just hitting leg stump, but a little closer to the middle of the stump. In fact, when it's zoomed in really close, it has hit the leg stump only a fraction inside where the previous ball struck. But as it is hitting the centre line of the stump, and is therefore inside the "zone of certainty", the third umpire must tell the umpire in the middle to reverse his decision and give the batsman out. The umpire in the middle crosses his arms and raises his finger. The batsman and umpire have both been denied the benefit, while the fielding captain is cock-a-hoop because his gamble has paid off. On top of that, he keeps his one remaining challenge alive.

In three balls you have a snapshot of the ridiculous system the ICC has hung its hat on. Zone of certainty? For something that never happened, was simply predicted? No wonder so many players think it is flawed - though they rarely say it out loud in case of retribution. Also, it is little wonder the fans think it's madness, because it's confusing, complex and often contradictory.

The DRS as it is needs to be scrapped. Instead, why not sit down with everyone's interest and opinion tabled and we might see the following, or something similar.

One unsuccessful challenge per team per innings. The clear direction to all players will then be that the only time the system should be used is when an embarrassing mistake has been made that should be overturned for everyone's sake. In other words, the players are protecting the umpire. The system is not for personal or team tactical use. That would be regarded as going against the spirit of the game and the umpires.

This way, the game keeps moving, whereas if the third umpire was given the exclusive role of reviewing, he would be doing it every time, including for any 50-50 calls, for fear of been hauled up and exposed for not getting every single decision right. This would only slow the game down more, and cricket is already an incredibly slow sport. In truth, all sports can't ensure all decisions are accurate; that is part of their beauty. What is important is to remove embarrassment, to protect the umpire and the player on the wrong end of such a howler.

No predictive path is necessary. The trajectory that is forecast never came to pass in reality. It is subjective to the umpire and his expertise, and is part of cricket. To remove the howler, Hot Spot and real-time Snicko, along with super slo-mo replays can do the job.

The technology that should be used is the actual path and the virtual mat. That is accurate to a few millimetres and is sufficient to assist the umpires with line calls regarding balls pitching outside leg or hitting outside off, just as it does for line calls for stumpings and run-outs, and as in tennis.

Alas, Richardson is incredibly stubborn. There isn't a chance in hell he will back off his own creation, and hence the ongoing stalemate. He is hoping to sway Kumble, Srinivasan, and the BCCI, with spin. One would imagine that Kumble knows bad spin from good more than anyone. Richardson is up against a resolute, enduring opponent. He, for one, has a shelf life, and the BCCI, which isn't going anywhere, won't budge an inch. The stalemate will continue.

DRS in the parallel universe

JANUARY 1, 2014
Jon Hotten in Cricinfo 

India may not use DRS, but the decisions they receive from umpires today are tinged with a DRS worldview  © Getty Images

Enlarge

The theory of multiple universes was developed by an academic physicist called Hugh Everett. He was proposing an answer to the famous paradox of Schrödinger's Cat, a thought experiment in which the animal is both alive and dead until observed in one state or the other.

Everett's idea was that every outcome of any event happened somewhere - in the case of the cat, it lived in one universe and died in another. All possible alternative histories and futures were real. It was a mind-bending thought, but then the sub-atomic world operates on such scales. Everett's idea was dismissed at first, and wasn't accepted as a mainstream interpretation in its field until after his death in 1982. Like most theories in physics, its nature is essentially ungraspable by the layman - certainly by me - but superficially it chimes with one of the sports fan's favourite question, the "what-if". And after all, the DRS has produced a moment when a batsman can be both in and out to exactly the same ball. 

There came a point during the fourth Test in Melbourne, as Monty Panesar bowled to Brad Haddin with Australia at 149 for 6 in reply to England's 255, when Monty had what looked like a stone-dead LBW shout upheld. Haddin reviewed, as the match situation demanded he must, and the decision was overturned by less than the width of a cricket ball.

In the second Test in Durban, Dale Steyn delivered the first ball of the final day to Virat Kohli with India on 68 for 2, 98 runs behind South Africa. The ball brushed his shoulder and the umpire sent him on his way. India don't use DRS, and so the on-field decision stood.

When the fans of the future stare back through time at the scorecards of both games, they will look at wins by wide margins - eight wickets for Australia and ten wickets for South Africa. They might not notice these "what-if" events.

Yet it's worth a thought as to what might have happened should England have had another 50 or 60 runs in the bank on first innings, and India the in-form Kohli at the crease to take the morning wrath of Steyn. Test cricket has a capacity to develop thin cracks into chasms as wide as the cracks in a WACA pitch, and the game is full of subtle changes that discharge their payload further down the line.

The thought that somewhere out there is a universe without DRS for England and with it for India is no consolation to the losing sides, but such moments highlight the ongoing flux within the system.

As soon as Kohli was fired out, Twitter was filled with comments along the lines of: "Bet they wish they had DRS now", but as one voice amongst the clamour noted: "India don't deserve poor umpiring because they don't want DRS."

That point had weight. Even in games without the system it retains its impact because it has reshaped the way umpires and players approach the game. India will, for example, still have batsmen given out leg before wicket while stretching well down the pitch in the post-DRS manner, because the worldview of the umpire has been changed by what he has seen on its monitors. Players bat and bowl differently, and umpires give different decisions, because of what DRS has shown them.

The retirement of Graeme Swann was something of a milestone in this respect. His career would have been significantly altered had he not been such a master of exploiting the conditions created by DRS. He knew how to bowl to get front-foot LBW decisions. In response, batsmen have had to adapt their techniques when playing spin bowlers.

In this way and in others, DRS has become knitted into the fabric of Test cricket, whether it is being used or not. Were it to be withdrawn now, its effects would still exist, and irrevocably so.

But India's aversion still has its merits. It's now thuddingly obvious that DRS will never be used for its original purpose, the eradication of the obvious mistake. Instead, it has, in a classic case of function-creep, become the sentry of the fine margin, inserting itself into places where its own deficiencies are highlighted. The Ashes series in England was inflamed by a malfunctioning Hotspot. The Ashes series in Australia has revealed that umpires no longer seem to check the bowler for front-foot no-balls.

The outsourcing of DRS technology remains a paradox worthy of Schrödinger. TV companies have to pay for it, and the developers of the system have a commercial reason to stress its accuracies. Such truths sit uneasily with the notion of fairness and impartiality. Similarly, players have been radicalised into ersatz umpires, having to choose whether or not to have decisions made. Such randomness also impinges on impartiality.

It's hard to think of something more implacable as a piece of machinery, and yet cricket has found a way to politicise it, and it's this, at heart, where India's objections lay. They have a point.

 .

A Possible solution to the DRS Imbroglio

by Girish Menon

The DRS debate, definitely on the netosphere and to some extent on TV and print media, appears to be a conversation of the deaf. These warriors appear to have wrapped themselves in national colours with scorn and ridicule being the weapons used. Does this win over their opponents? I doubt it, because both groups are dominated by users of terms like 'Luddites' and '100 % foolproof' which instead of persuading the dissenter actually antagonises them. In this piece I will attempt to try to mediate this debate and attempt a possible solution to the imbroglio.

It is a principle of rhetoric that the side demanding a change from the status quo must provide the burden of proof. To that extent I will agree that the pro DRS lobby have already proven that DRS does reduce the number of umpiring errors in a cricket match. I'm sure that BCCI will admit this point. However the ICC's claim that DRS improves decisions by 93 % is in the realm of statistics and it is possible to find methodological grey areas that will challenge this number. So for purposes of this argument I'm willing to discount ICC's claim and willing to start on the premise that DRS does reduce errors by at least 70 %. The debate should actually be more concerned with the next question i.e. 'at what price does one obtain this 70% increase in decision accuracy and is it worthwhile?' This question is ignored by net warriors and media pundits alike and I wonder why?

Before I proceed further I wish to remind readers of the MMR scare scandal, not many years ago, that prompted a mass scare in the UK about a triple jab vaccine and its links with autism. Some may recall Andrew Wakefield, an expert, on TV exhorting viewers to avoid the vaccine. The saga ended with Wakefield being discredited and found to have multiple undeclared conflicts of interest in propagating the scare.

-------

Also Read

Cricket and DRS - The Best is not the Enemy of the Good

Umpiring Decisions should be based on Facts not Opinions

Cricket, Physics and the Laws of Probability

On Walking - Advice for a Fifteen Year Old

------

To avoid a similar hijacking of the DRS debate I suggest that all protagonists declare their interests in the matter. I for one have no truck with any cricketing body or media organisation or a technology provider or a provider of a competing technology. Also, I'd like a reduction in umpiring errors at a price that will sustain and grow cricket all over the world.

Similarly it is incumbent on the likes of Michael Vaughan to declare their links with the purveyors of such technologies so that the cricket loving public know that their views are without any profit or personal motive.

While the reliability and validity of DRS technologies has been well debated, the monopoly profits that derive to these suppliers has been largely ignored. I suspect this is the real issue where the BCCI is at loggerheads with the others. As an outsider, I think national cricket boards have their own technology suppliers which they wish to back. They may even have an investment in them which may expose their reluctance to adopt alternative and cheaper solutions to a problem. Jagmohan Dalmiya's argument against the esoteric Duckworth-Lewis method is a case in point.

It is a truism that in the market for technologies, unfortunately, the best technology does not always win.  Economics students will be aware that Dvorak keyboards have never made much headway against their QWERTY rivals and  Betamax became a cropper to VHS. So just like the well ensconced Duckworth Lewis method, Hot Spot  and Hawk Eye hope to become monopoly providers of technology services to the ICC. This will enable them protection from cheaper alternative service providers and will guarantee their promoters life long rents.

There is another dimension to this issue viz. 'Cost'. In 1976 the FIH (International Federation for Hockey) replaced natural turf with astroturf to improve the game. Today, while the game looks good on TV and is fast etc it provides no competition to cricket in countries playing both sports. One possible cause is the decline of the sport in India and Pakistan, the two nations who did not have the financial resources to create adequate 'astroturf based' infrastructure among the lovers of the sport. Along similar lines, the prohibitively expensive DRS technology may bankrupt the smaller cricket boards of the world. I'm sure no warrior on either side of this debate wants a reduction in the numerical diversity of cricket lovers.

I suppose as a way out of this imbroglio would be for the ICC to take ownership of the current technologies and make the technology 'open source'. Allow competitive bidding for DRS services instead of paying monopoly rents to the patent owning suppliers. I'm sure this will reduce the costs for DRS and even the BCCI will be keen to support such a venture.  

Seeing is unbelieving: DRS in a pickle

Vedam Jaishankar in Times News Network 6/8/13



For some time now the BCCI has been cast as a demon by ICC's former veto-power countries' media. Snide remarks and leaks to the English and Australian media by influential voices in those countries and even within ICC made it seem that the BCCI was responsible for all the ills dogging cricket. 

The malicious plethora of blame ranged from BCCI's position on the Decision Review System to IPL to television money to cricket schedule to pitches to every other issue related to the game. 

How ironic then that with the BCCI far removed from the scene, it is the two Ashes combatants who are smarting under a string of goof-ups, almost all of their making. Tragically for them there is no big, bad wolf to blame for what must already go down as one of the touchiest of series. 

DRS, which was hailed as the greatest invention since sliced bread, is in a veritable pickle. The joke though was when the inventor of the so-called Hot Spot admitted that batsmen were confusing the gizmo by using metallic stickers on their bats. He insisted that the Hot Spot be used with an enhanced snick-o-meter as a back-up. As seen in the Ashes series that is no cure either, as third umpires are also confused by the snicks; not sure whether these are triggered by the sound of bat hitting ground or ball brushing the pad. 

-------
Also read

Cricket and DRS - The Best is not the Enemy of the Good

On Walking - Advice for a Fifteen Year Old

------

The benefit of doubt, which traditionally went to the batsman, now tended to go in favour of the Snick-o-meter and Hot Spot! When the mistakes became too glaring to ignore, vested interests, much in the fashion of the American Gun Lobby who claimed "guns don't kill people; people do" stated that it was the umpires who goofed up on interpretation and not their 'hallowed' gizmos. 

But DRS was not the only sore point. Bad light became an issue in the Ashes Tests much like Tests in the past. These two Ashes nations which attempted to make other countries play Tests under lights did not want to use similar floodlights to dispel darkness. Yes, the lights were switched on, but were not good enough to support Test cricket! 

This was the last straw for Australia who believed they have borne the brunt of the many errors. Their skipper Michael Clarke was seen vehemently arguing with the umpires on live television. At the end of the day's play David Warner revealed that Clarke thought the light was good enough but the umpires thought otherwise. 

Did Clarke bring the game into dispute by arguing publicly on the field of play? Most cricket-loving viewers would have thought so. But did the ICC's match referee too see it that way? Time will tell. That brings us to the cricket pitches. Were they ideal for batting? 

Not really. Not when the ball turns square in the midst of the match, or the odd delivery leaps off a length. Had this been an Indian pitch we would not have heard the last of it. But Australia and England, they have their own rules and they'd be happy if everybody (read as BCCI) too plays to those rules.