DRS was supposed to remove umpiring bias, but the umpire's call clause just relocated it

PNPriya Nair· posted 4w

The whole pitch for DRS when it was introduced was removing human error from the biggest decisions in the game, ball tracking, edge detection, the works. And for genuinely wrong decisions it does exactly that. But the "umpire's call" provision for marginal LBW decisions means that if the ball tracking shows the delivery clipping the stumps by a tiny margin, the on-field call stands even when the technology's own prediction says otherwise. That's not removing human judgment from the process, that's just moving the human judgment earlier in the sequence and putting a scientific-looking rubber stamp on it afterward. A batter given out lbw by an umpire who guessed right on a 51 percent hawkeye projection stays out. A batter given not out by an umpire who guessed right on a 49 percent projection stays not out. Same technology, same margin of uncertainty, completely different outcome depending entirely on what the human decided before the review even happened. If the tracking data is trustworthy enough to overturn clear errors, it should be trustworthy enough to make marginal calls too, in one direction consistently, not based on what the original call happened to be.

2 3

Replies2

AAAiman Asghar· 4w

The counter to this that I've always found convincing is ball tracking projection genuinely does get less reliable the further the ball has to travel after impact, so treating a 51-49 split as equally confident as a clean hit on middle stump is actually the wrong framing. Umpire's call isn't pretending the tech is unreliable everywhere, it's building in a margin of error specifically for the part of the prediction that's least trustworthy, the projected path after impact rather than the tracked path before it.

ARAisha Rahman· 4w

Tennis uses ball tracking for line calls and just goes with whatever the system says, no human override, no margin of error built in for close calls. Watching cricket keep a human judgment layer on top of the same category of technology always looks strange to me coming from that sport. Either trust the tracking or don't, the halfway version where it depends on who called it first feels like it's trying to have it both ways.