South Africa cricket coach Mickey Arthur has become the latest prominent figure in the sport to express reservations about the Hawk-Eye technology that is now being used to check leg-before-wicket decisions.
“I’m not 100 percent convinced about the predictive element of Hawk-Eye and I don’t think many players are either,” Arthur wrote in next month’s issue of Wisden Cricketer.
Hawk-Eye uses data produced by video cameras to predict whether a ball that has hit the batsman on the pads would have gone on to hit the stumps, the “lbw” decision that can be among the most contentious in cricket. The technology is used in tennis to decide disputed line calls.
Under the Umpire Decision Review System implemented in the recent four-match series between South Africa and England and in six Tests in Australia, a third umpire uses Hawk-Eye to help decide whether the on-field official has made a correct decision in the event of an appeal from either side.
The case against Hawk-Eye was put by former Australia fast bowler Dennis Lillee, who said: “There’s no way Hawk-Eye can tell if a delivery is going to skid a bit more than normal or hit a crack, or a damp or worn patch, or a bit of grass on the wicket.”
It is a case that is robustly rejected by Paul Hawkins, the inventor of Hawk-Eye and a former player with the English minor county Buckinghamshire who graduated from Durham University with a doctorate in artificial intelligence.
“Dennis Lillee’s accuracy as a bowler is far greater than the accuracy of his journalism,” Hawkins said in a telephone interview. “He has no understanding of the technology. He has got no idea what he is talking about.”
Hawkins said Hawk-Eye calculated the trajectory of a ball after it had bounced and hit the batsman’s pad, based purely on the behavior of that particular ball.
“You only need about a foot [30cm] to travel and you get an accurate prediction of the line, you need a little bit more to predict the height,” he said. “If there is very little distance between pitching point and hitting the batsman, that is the hardest time to make an accurate prediction. That’s exactly the same for an umpire. We don’t measure before the ball is bowled, we measure what has happened on that ball.”
Hawkins said the umpires in each of the 10 Tests in which Hawk-Eye had been used to help determine lbw decisions believed each decision had been correct.
“We have now 10 Test matches and most of the referrals have been lbws,” he said. “We have certainly got every single one right.”
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