0Why is DRS technology coming under fire?

I actu­ally star­ted the out­line of this art­icle over 2 weeks ago. Since then I’ve been abroad, whilst the cri­ti­cisms of DRS have just got louder. There wont be any fence sit­ting from me — I’m a big fan of the DRS sys­tem, and I intend to deal with all the cri­ti­cisms I’ve heard and put for­ward a sol­id case for the use of tech­no­logy in cricket.

Let’s start by being clear — there have been some ter­rible DRS decisions this sum­mer in Eng­land, all of which are due cri­ti­cism. How­ever, there is a clear case of con­firm­a­tion bias going on with some com­ment­at­ors and pun­dits, who notice every time the DRS sys­tem fails, but aren’t noti­cing the large major­ity of cases where it is work­ing exactly as it should do. Fur­ther — most of the ter­rible decisions have been just that — ter­rible decisions, by the 3^rd umpire, and not a fault with tech­no­logy. There has also been at least one case where the rules have been absurd. The tech­no­logy can­’t take the blame for fail­ings of 3^rd umpires and the rules of the game. How many “mis­takes” has the tech­no­logy made?  Argu­ably one — where Sky failed to have a Hot­Spot cam­era avail­able as they were show­ing a replay. Again though — I would argue this is a fail­ure of Sky to use the tech­no­logy prop­erly — or rather a poor decision by a TV edit­or or pro­du­cer — in oth­er words — a human.

So, the tech­no­logy itself is excel­lent and works very well, but the sys­tem as a whole is some­times fail­ing. It also adds to the enter­tain­ment and excite­ment of the game. Rather than high­light­ing its weak points to gen­er­ate a con­tro­versy (which the media love, hence why they’re doing it!) we should ask if is there any­thing that can be done to improve the sys­tem as a whole?  The answer is of course there is…

• The HawkEye ball track­er is 99.9% accur­ate — so reduce the “umpires call” error mar­gin — so there are far less umpire’s calls.
• If a team reviews, and is unsuc­cess­ful because it is giv­en “umpires call” the team should not lose a review.
• Whenev­er a review is used, it should auto­mat­ic­ally be used to check all reas­ons for being out or not out. So even if a play­er is giv­en out caught, and they are actu­ally LBW, they are still out.
• Con­trol of the tech­no­logy should not be man­aged by a TV com­pany, but by someone employed by the ground, the ICC or the host association.
• Snicko and Hot­spot should be used togeth­er — clear evid­ence with either is suf­fi­cient to make a decision, if the evid­ence is incon­clus­ive the decision stays with the onfield umpire.
• The 3^rd umpire should be provided with a large high qual­ity screen, fed from a high speed high res­ol­u­tion cam­era for run out/stumped decisions.
• All 3^rd umpire decisions should be explained when the replay is shown on the big screen. Either via text on the screen or via the sta­di­um PA sys­tem. This is already done in text form when the ball track­er is used.
• The onfield umpires should be able to call for a review them­selves of any­thing at any time.

In addi­tion to these changes, all ICC umpires should be giv­en some addi­tion­al train­ing on the use of DRS, a sug­ges­tion made by John Hold­er.

The only dif­fi­cult issue not resolved by these changes is the issue of bat tape redu­cing the util­ity of Hot­Spot. The use of Snicko will par­tially alle­vi­ate the prob­lem, but it is likely some nicks will remain undetec­ted. I would argue that even if some go undetec­ted, the use of tech­no­logy will pick up more nicks than not using tech­no­logy, and although not every decision will be cor­rect, more decisions will be cor­rect than without tech­no­logy. This can only be a good thing.