The Int'l Cricket Council has been dealing with the "controversial technology" of its replay system, the Decision Review System. ICC GM of Cricket GEOFF ALLARDICE "goes candid" on the technology and "how it can be improved to get more correct umpiring decisions" in a recent Q&A with Makarand Waingankar of the TIMES OF INDIA.
Q: With reference to the Ashes series, what's ICC's take on the DRS?
Geoff Allardice: The aim of the DRS is to increase the number of correct umpiring decisions. During the Ashes Tests, this percentage increased from 92.2% to 97.3% after using DRS, which is consistent with its overall performance.
Q: Most top former players feel that the DRS should be left to the field umpires, without having any limitations on reviews. What do you think?
Allardice: The ICC hasn't dismissed the idea of using an umpire review model in the future, particularly as technology improves. For that, though, it has to show an improvement on the player review model that is currently being used. We have tried giving control to the umpires, in the Super Series in 2005 for example, and we saw that the umpires would either review every decision and slow down the game, or selectively review decisions and miss correcting an error.
Q: The players feel the percentage of human error is growing at an alarming rate. Could this be attributed to heavy load of work on umpires?
Allardice: The ICC's statistics do not suggest that the number of umpiring errors is growing at an "alarming rate." The decisions are now being dissected by broadcast technology that gets better every year, and analyzed by media and social media, magnifying the impact of every error . Even with this analysis, the quality of the umpiring decisions remains at a remarkably high level (TIMES OF INDIA, 9/5).
DRS SUPPORT: The PTI reported former ICC President Ehsan Mani "has backed the decision of the sport's governing body to persist" with the DRS, which, according to him, "has helped in reducing the mistakes of umpires." Mani: "I think they are only minor issues now related to the technology use in the DRS but they are not serious enough to warrant suspending the use of the UDRS." Mani said that "he had no doubt that DRS would only get better with time." Mani: "Overall you look at the results produced by using the DRS it has improved the accuracy of umpiring decisions by around 95 percent which is a huge step forward" (PTI, 9/5).
