Umpire’s call offers vital shade of grey

“My personal opinion is that if the ball hits the stumps, the ball hits the stumps. They should take away the umpire's decision, if I'm perfectly honest. But I don't want to go into too much detail, because then it becomes will feel like we're moaning and saying that's why we lost.

Make what you will of Ben Stokes' remarks on DRS at the end of the Rajkot Test. On social media, however, many observers heard the groans, far louder than any justified outrage, at the end of a test in which his team had been soundly beaten.

Stokes then clarified that technology was not the reason for England's defeat. Still, there's no denying that they were on the wrong end of a series of extremely close DRS calls during the contest – most notably that of Zak Crawley in moto two, which was shown to be such a marginal kick that the TV graph didn't even match the data returned by Hawk-Eye.

These were the reasons why Stokes and Brendon McCullum contacted match referee Jeff Crowe at the end of the match to ask for clarification on a system which, as McCullum later admitted to the British media: “I don't understand really, to be honest. …it's a little difficult, from a layman's point of view, to understand how it works.”

Either way, the genie is back out of the bottle, now that the England captain has denigrated a system far more deeply nuanced than the binary arguments that invariably follow it. Virat Kohli did much the same during England's last tour of India in 2021, when he suggested that the umpire's decision “creates a lot of confusion” – a remark which directly led to the 'ICC to recalibrate the wicket zone from the bottom of the bars to the top. .

Who knows if Stokes' remarks will have a similar outcome, but it's another blow to a process that effectively protects players from the justice they think they're seeking. No one can ever claim that DRS is a perfect system, and there is no denying that it raised eyebrows for a few days in Rajkot. But when it comes to the unique problem of heavyweights and their reliance on incomplete information, the arbitrator's decision offers a shade of gray when neither black nor white is appropriate for the process that players experience. Essentially, this spares the sport from exactly the kind of hot spot we're facing now.

After all, we're talking about the probability that, stopped in its tracks about six feet from its target, a piece of leather with a diameter of about 2.8″ would have struck a stack of 28″ x 9″ sticks with sufficient precision. to dislodge either of the two wooden crutches which still protrude 0.5″ above the height of the three stumps themselves – an anomaly which could very well have explained the misrepresentation of the aforementioned Crawley dismissal.

And so, returning to Stokes' initial statement – ​​“if the ball hits the stumps, the ball hits the stumps” – what does that actually mean?

If we take his remark at face value and assume that Stokes believes that even the slightest nudge on the stumps should count as a dismissal, this would essentially leave batters defending a target area of ​​almost double the actual dimensions of the wicket – about 450 square inches instead of 252, taking into account the additional surface area created by the diameter of the ball on three sides.

And yet, in a fortuitous incident during the 2021-22 Ashes tour, Stokes himself became the living, breathing manifestation of the need for margin of error in decision-making. Facing a delivery from Cameron Green in the Sydney Test, he was given a heavy hit by on-field umpire Paul Reiffel, but he managed to knock it down when replays showed the ball had missed his pad but he had cut the stump without dislodging the bail.

And so, to go to the other extreme, if Stokes suggested that only balls which would completely shatter the stumps should be considered for heavyweights, then that target area would drop to little more than the dimensions of the middle stump itself (86). square inches, since you asked), and the sport would return to the pre-DRS days when hitters were allowed to park the front mat with impunity and knock out Fingerspinners in particular.

Obviously, if the arbitrator's decision were to be abolished, these parameters would have to be set at a mutually acceptable point between these two extremes. But this would not address the fact that the stump target area would be arbitrarily and permanently expanded – by almost 100 square inches, even for 50% impact – nor would it be necessary to arrive at a point at the limit of this limit. margin, like when flipping a switch, when the light goes dark and you are faced with the complete reversal of a given decision.

England, ironically, found this out the hard way in the second Test at Visakhapatnam, when Crawley, again, fell victim to a controversial lbw – this time a delivery adjacent to Kuldeep Yadav's leg stump which appeared to slip down, but was expected to hit enough off stump to overturn the no-out verdict on the field.

And this exception arguably confirms the rule that the referee's decision is an essential factor in managing expectations. As we have seen in football since the advent of VAR, the 180-degree decision turnaround is the most frustrating aspect of the introduction of the technology. It is not an improvement to kill the passion of the moment by pausing all emotions until the all-seeing eye has had its last word, especially when the verdict is overturned by the skin of the knee. 'a fielder or the point of a cricket ball. sewing.

Absolutists will always say that we must trust the technology: if it is good enough for missile guidance, then it is clearly an improvement over the all-too-human eye of the referee. But this argument misses the point on several levels.

First, it ignores the fallibility that exists even in machines: tennis has successfully integrated Hawk-Eye for line calls and has the advantage of being able to reproduce the full trajectory of the ball in every controversial case. But at Wimbledon in 2022, to cite just one example, American player Rajeev Ram refused to play after disputing a close decision. “We turn off the machine,” he demanded. “We’re not in the future here, man.”

Second, and more importantly, the crux of the DRS itself was never to extract absolute truths about the layoffs, but to eliminate blatant injustices. Clear screamers, such as Alec Stewart's infamous lbw against Sanath Jayasuriya in 2000-01 that launched six inches outside leg, are handled quietly and effectively these days. As are all kinds of interior edges in the pads. The problems that cause the stench are those that lie precisely at the border of entrances and exits.

In other words, 50-50 clear calls, which always have and always will fall into that sweet spot of contention, and which explode from time to time, regardless of any attempt at mitigation. It is surely preferable, in such cases, for a decision on the ground to guide the emotions in the resulting evaluation, even if – in Crawley's case – the result is not quite what it is. injured team hopes.