The Great DRS debate

[The Professor]

Gentlemen

What do we think?

It seems in vogue at the moment, regardless of your sporting predilections, to be critical of technology in sport.

In football the criticism is that there is too much but in cricket it is the reverse.

There are a variety of opinions on this point going from doing away with umpires and having every delivery hawkeyed or making it all down to umpires call and anything else in between.

On a day where an umpire's mistake drastically effected a match and in a series where's umpiring has not particularly covered itself in glory; where do we stand on this?

All knee jerk responses welcome.

[sussexpob]

From match thread.....

I think Yuppie makes a valid point myself. We have had to sacrifice large tranches of the entertainment value of the game because integrity is deemed important enough to spoil the flow of the contest, but we then put bizarre processes in place that allow games to be decided on mistakes that could be corrected. This is verging on ridiculous. Recently, I cant remember the exact figure, but its posted somewhere on a discussion about overs rates..... I think the exact figure was 16-20 reviews a game on average.

So lets say conservatively, on average we spend 40 minutes (2 per review) getting decisions right a game, but here with a series on the line a bowler was dredging back to his mark preparing to bowl his final ball, while people at home had already seen a replay that showed he'd just won the match. 40 minutes of less cricket is ok, but with the series and urn on the line, an extra 20 seconds is excessive?

The first ball of this series was edge and not given out. The first wicket of this series was given and was not out. In fact, the whole of the first test was an umpiring disaster, and Australia lost a lot of wickets in that first innings incorrectly. The limiting requirement for reviews also limits the capacity of integrity. You are therefore always going to have issues.

I for one am of the opinion having the capacity to make a right decision, but not being allowed to question it, for whatever reason, is far worse a situation than not having the capacity to question it. You cant strive for integrity of decision making while accepting that 50% of wrong decisions can just be ignored. That makes no sense.

Integrity comes at the cost of entertainment value, of the flow of the game..... is it worth having an imperfect system at the cost of longer days? At the cost of falling attendances due to less overs, less of a spectacle? Is losing tech a step backwards, or is a step forwards for many aspects of the game?

[sussexpob]

VAR in football really is something I detest, as a side note, and has changed the way I look at tech in all sports. Its that aspect of what can be defined as a "key moment".... so many times you see a foul up the top of the field not given, the ball comes back to the other end of the pitch and the exact same infringement occurs in the box, and it goes to VAR as a penalty. Once you start asking about minor infringements, you do open the door to this idea of what is considered worthy of review or what has sufficient impact.

Does a foul leading to loss of possession, leading to a goal or penalty or card have an impact.... yes, but only becomes significant with other events occurring. And sometimes these can take a long time to develop. Does a team who losses a ball from a foul, who then a conceded a corner, which then ends in the back of a net, ever gain the ball back? No... so the change of possession is a key moment. But that could be 2 minutes in the past.

In the end, its all a load of rubbish. Get rid of it and play the game.

[Arthur Crabtree]

I was against extending DRS to include keeping your referral if the tech came back umpire's choice, because it validated the captain talking a punt on a marginal decision, rather than a howler. But given that change, the captains don't really have any justification for complaint. Just stop using DRS in the hope of a freebee.

[Durhamfootman]

used correctly, for the purpose for which it was intended, every team should finish the match with the same number of referrals available to them as they started with

if they don't, then somewhere down the line that team took a punt on something that wasn't clearly wrong

[Durhamfootman]

cricket is different, of course. every other sport uses video reviews and/or ball tracking to see in detail something that has actually happened. AFAIK cricket is the only sport that uses this technology to predict what might have happened if something else hadn't happened first....... head hurts....... recipe for disaster.... but which is then dressed up as a true representation of what absolutely would have happened if the something else hadn't happened first.

It isn't the DRS that annoys me, so much as the way it is used by captains/batsmen alike and the way it is demonstratively misrepresented by the TV in a snazzy graphic that clearly shows the ball grazing the edge of a bail and flicking it off..... "OUT..... woo hoo!"

[Durhamfootman]

That being said... cricket is a stop/start game and so there is time for these reviews without unduly stopping the flow of the game... and, I suppose, the decision/referral/TV graphic/decision process does bring a touch of theatre, which some might argue adds to the game.

Even I have been known to watch a big appeal being rejected and then not referred, and then waited to see what hawkeye says for the TV, because it looked to me like it was missing leg and I want to see if I'm right

and then I think..... "ooh that was close"

I never think.... "ooh that might very well have been close, depending on what the algorithm suggests the range of possibilities were whilst simultaneously allowing for the pre-determined margins for error"

or words to that effect

[sussexpob]

I was against extending DRS to include keeping your referral if the tech came back umpire's choice, because it validated the captain talking a punt on a marginal decision, rather than a howler. But given that change, the captains don't really have any justification for complaint. Just stop using DRS in the hope of a freebee.

Punishing an appealing side for getting a decision right makes absolutely zero sense, the distinction between "howler" and "not out" has been totally eradicated by technology, there is zero justification for separating the two as long as the given result falls in the margin of error of the technology. The only results the system should spit out are "out", "not out" or in 0.0001 percent of decisions when the ball is missing or hitting by fractions of a mm, a "null" decision which rests on field. A bowler who appeals on DRS for an umpires call hit has judged the call 100% correctly, it is the umpire that has made the mistake. Why cricket insists on protecting the original decision makes no sense, doubly punishing the fielding team for that mistake was psychopathic.

With that in mind, a captain should be rights be able to look at an incident and challenge anything he thinks is over 50% out with confidence. Asking captains to have impeccable judgement when umpires themselves make errors in abundance seems a dubious split of responsibilities...... Wilson has made countless disastrous calls, but Paine deserves to lose the match because with a couple of runs left he made a single bad call which might have been motivated by a hint of desperation? Is this the type of system that sounds like its bringing equitable relief to the sport?

Its worth noting that nothing happens in a vacuum. For every umpire mistake, and there have been plenty go against Australia in a short space of time, the mindset of a captain changes. You say Paine has no justification for complaint, but how would you feel if you kept on trusting the judgement of the umpire, only to find in the first test at least, he was wrong about 20 times? You are wrong twice in a series and you lose a test and the Ashes on that? Every mistake makes you more convinced you could be right. Paine was probably left thinking "you know what, they need two runs and the umpire has been wrong about everything, maybe he's got this one wrong again".

We can pretend that technology is there for a whole host of reasons, but the true one is to make sure that the right decisions are made. And yet, we are still getting too many decisions wrong when a tool exists that can solve the issue. This is crazy. Either use the technology to its potential, or dont use it. This hybrid nonsense of "a decision must be a terrible one, not just wrong" mixed with "but it can be terrible too if the captain makes a couple of wrong ones before" seems to solve nothing. It just leaves those errors that slip the net fill the space that more errors used to occupy, and it feels worse.

Its worth remembering a lot of occasions, there are no umpires call errors either;lots of feather edges, bats hitting ground or flicking pads producing noises, or whose balls that hit pad and bat around the same instance which all look out to the naked eye until you slow them down. Gloved chances down the leg side, bat pad catches..... alot of umpiring mistakes come from these because the margins are tiny, they can look out a lot of the time.

[Durhamfootman]

We can pretend that technology is there for a whole host of reasons, but the true one is to make sure that the right decisions are made.

unless it's to make sure that the blatantly wrong ones can be corrected

the umpire Bucknor lbw out decision that clearly, blatantly, indisputedly and undeniably took an extraordinarily obvious thick edge on the way to the pad......

Nasser will remember them... Colly too, I think

[yuppie]

DRS was bought in to stop incorrect decisions from having a negative impact on matches and series.

This one decision could potentially have the biggest impact on a ashes series ever.

Put simply the system is flawed if what it was designed to stop is still happening. At present its just created another level to the game with out fixing the the issues it was designed to stop.

The results are in, the Australian players have taken it well. The Australian press and supporters less so. But no one wants to see this happen again, bad decisions deciding matches and even series. Especially when the technology showed within 30 seconds the mistake.

So the system needs to be looked at again and improved. DRS was designed to limit against human errors to produce fairer results. It was designed to take out human mistakes on clear decisions. But here 2 humans mistakes has lead to the wrong result. The umpire got a clear LBW wrong, and Paine earlier referred a clear not out.

Human error in deciding clear decisions is still having a huge impact on the outcome of matches and series. DRS has not fixed the problems, its just changed how they are occurring.

Incidents like this will just help to keep evolving the game and how it is administered. It has shown the problems with DRS and how it is managed now. I would expect more changes to come to make sure cricket gets to a place where we end up with the right results. Taking referrals out of players hands might be a first step. It creates a lottery that as this series has shown multiple time does not always lead to the correct decisions being made. Wrong decisions and howlers are still happening in the game. DRS just seems to be shifting some of the blame from umpires onto players. The umpire made the wrong decision, but its your fault for making the wrong decision earlier, even though the right decision was made by the umpire then.

I believe that all cricket fans just want to see the right decisions being made, and that big decisions like this are a thing of the past.

[backfootpunch]

I think the DRS system has messed up here looking again

Get a ruler out and put it in a line from where it pitched to where it hit stokes on the pad

It wouldve hit leg stump, not middle and leg

Drs seems to be suggesting that the ball wouldve curved randomly a good inch or so after pitching which surely isnt the case

My ruler suggests that if you follow the path from landing to impact it would go on to hit leg, it seems to be almost a ball width off

[backfootpunch]

It would likely have been overturned with a review anyway but not even close to being as plumb as DRS has made it look

[backfootpunch]

And looking closely at the ball after pitching it is rotating end over end so cant possibly curve like drs is suggesting

I have it almost a ball width off of the true path, still out but not plumb in front

[GGAS]

I tend to agree with that BFP. Although it is difficult to say the naked eye trumps technology, my initial intuition when watching was that it was umpires call. On replay, I thought it hitting leg. It would need to take a giant turn to hit mid-leg.

[Arthur Crabtree]

Yes, when I finally got round to seeing it, it didn't look plain dead.