Clive Lloyd calls for more technology

[Richard Jenkins]

Clive Lloyd has called for increased use of technology to help umpires in decision-making. Delivering the Colin Cowdrey Spirit of Cricket lecture at Lord's, Lloyd suggested that umpires should be given the same aids that television offers its viewers.

"How can it be right to ask an umpire to take a split-second decision based on his own eyesight and hearing while everyone else then judges that decision having made use of technology designed for the purpose?

"It is time to use technology to the full extent," Lloyd added. "Umpires should be able to defer to the precision of Hawk-Eye, particularly in determining whether a batsman is lbw, whether there has been a bat-pad catch, and whether a batsman is caught behind the wicket where there's dispute over whether the ball has or has not been played."

Currently, technology is being used only for line decisions, and to help the on-field umpires with controversial catches taken close to the turf. There have been suggestions to allow both teams a certain number of appeals per day against decisions made by on-field umpires, and Lloyd, currently among the ICC's panel of match referees, felt that would be the right way to use technology. "I know there are problems about the time this will take," Lloyd said, "especially if a team is inclined to excessive appealing. But it should be possible to design restrictions on appealing to the use of technology, monitored by the referee."

The other issue that Lloyd was concerned about was the domination of the game by a few countries, leading to more and more no-contests. "World cricket must decide whether it is to consist of occasional riveting battles between three or four super cricket nations like Australia, England and South Africa and one-sided, poorly-attended intervening series between the strong and the weak, or whether it's prepared to do what is necessary to build up the number of competitive Test-playing nations."

The solution, he said, lay in spreading the funds to the lesser nations, so that they could build sufficient infrastructure. "The ICC should effect and oversee the equitable distribution of funds between developed and under-developed countries. Currently, countries such as my own West Indies are seriously disadvantaged and, as a result, infrastructure development and player development are falling behind.

"Despite individual exceptions, for sometimes great human character or talent overcomes all obstacles, there is a correlation between national economies and the performance of their sportsmen and women - it's inevitable. It means the strong helping the weak and if they do, they will strengthen the whole international game. If they don't, three or four countries will end up endlessly playing themselves - and everyone will lose patience with that."

[Richard Jenkins]

For technology
Humans v Machines. The greatest mythical battle of our times – one that cuts across cultures and continents – is the one we wage against technology. Much of science fiction is based on it: machines we create with the best intent take us over; and sometimes even change the conception of what it means to be human. Through our history – especially the last two centuries – almost every major technological advance has met with resistance. Ovens, it was once said, would take the charm out of cooking; industrial machinery would cause unemployment; in vitro fertilisation would subvert nature.
This fear of technology is linked to our natural fear of the unknown. For much of our history and pre-history, that unknown was nature. In prehistoric times, it was not merely practical but necessary to be wary of the natural world; more than just a conditioned response, that wariness became an instinct of our species – anything unfathomable had the potential to threaten our existence. In the last two centuries, of course, science has made nature known to us, but one great unknown has been replaced by another: technology. We react to machines today almost as our ancestors reacted to magic. At a rational level, we understand that there is solid science behind it; at an instinctive level, especially if the technology does something that we do, but does it better, we feel threatened.
Technology also has ideological enemies. Left-wing and liberal ideologies of the 20th century, that are still fashionable, draw upon the Rousseau-inspired myth of the Noble Savage for sustenance. The belief goes thus: man in his natural state, without technology and the conventions of modernity, lived a perfect, peaceful life, and our ideal should be to return to it. It is tempting to believe in the Noble Savage, and all utopian visions incorporate some version of it, but anthropologists, archaeologists and historians have, in recent decades, debunked it completely. Primitive societies were far more violent – in terms of the percentage of people killed in conflicts – and had far higher infant mortality rates and much lower life expectancies. In short, the notion that life without technology and modernity is a better life, in any respect, is just plain false.
Luddites over the last few decades have resisted technology at every move, for differently articulated reasons. But at every step, reason has won over, and once technology has been embraced, it has improved the living quality of humans. Household technology has been directly responsible for the emancipation of women – women's liberation would have been impossible if cooking in the 20th century was as time-consuming as in the 19th. In the 19th, in fact, the abolition of slavery was enabled by the fact that machines replaced much of the lowly manual labour required in farms and homes. And technology at an industrial level, instead of taking away jobs by replacing manual work, has raised production, which has boosted economies and created more jobs, while improving the standard of living for all. (An empirical illustration of this came in the 20th century, when the Soviet bloc resisted consumer technology as the Western world embraced it; the disparities between Western and Eastern Europe say it all.)
So what does all this have to do with cricket? Well, echoes of those age-old arguments against technology are heard in cricketing circles today, based around the issue of umpiring and technology, sparked off largely by Hawk-Eye, the technology for determining lbw decisions. Now, there are two kinds of arguments possible against technology: one, that the technology is not accurate enough, and that there are scientific flaws in the way it works; two, that whether or not it works is irrelevant, cricket benefits from having the human touch that an umpire gives it. Any argument that falls in the first category demands scrutiny, and must be taken seriously; any that falls in the second is based on a basic error of perception.
The error is that the whole debate is too often framed as technology v Humans. That is wrong. The correct way to see it is as Technology for Humans. Technology is there to help humans become more efficient at what they do. It is unfair, in the case of Hawk-Eye, to judge umpires with a technology that we do not make available for their use. (I personally believe that Hawk-Eye is more accurate, in every instance, than an umpire can be. Independent tests have found it so, and no objection has yet been made which points out any flaw in the science behind it.)
Another typical argument is that the charm of cricket comes from the element of uncertainty, and that human error is a part of that charm. I disagree. Cricket gets its charm not from human error but from human excellence. When a quality spinner is continually frustrated by batsmen who keep padding up to him and getting the benefit of the inevitable doubt, a doubt that technology can reduce, if not remove, that excellence is compromised. When a batsman like Sachin Tendulkar is wrongly given out time and again on his tours to Australia, to ludicrous errors that the use of technology would eliminate, that excellence is compromised. Technology reduces error and does justice to the excellence that is the soul of the game. Cricket can only benefit from it.

[Richard Jenkins]

The counter argument

Sporting beauty has innumerable facets, but for many of us its greatest attraction lies in the potential for romance. At some point in our ordinary existence, we have played the perfect cover-drive, holed the 25-foot uphill putt, or performed a step-over that left opposition defenders with twisted blood. For that infinitesimal moment, we were Garfield Sobers, Jack Nicklaus or George Best, with the world our oyster and dreams safely cosseted away from cold reality.
And from the time we could kick a ball about or grip a bat, we could argue like the best of our heroes. Anyone who ever played cricket with stumps chalked on a playground wall could tell you that rants and raves were never far away. Those who couldn't argue persuasively took the coward's way out, skulking home with bat, ball or stumps while the rest jeered. Leg-before decisions were a parallel universe, and each time the ball thudded into the shin, someone over-eager for a bat would raise the finger. If you were at the receiving end, you whined but it didn't stop you coming back for more the next day – motivated by romance's greatest ally, hope.
That was the reason most of us went out to play in the first place. If you were the school dunce, you could never dream of perfect marks, but on the field, even the most hopeless case could edge the boundary that won a match for his team. Nothing was black-and-white, and we found beauty in the many hues of grey.
And then you got technology. Suddenly, little beeps started to indicate faults in tennis, and in due course, people needed to stare at slow-motion replays to see if a batsman was short of his crease. Batsmen, who used to nonchalantly stroll about the crease after getting the faintest nick through to the keeper, were found out by ingenious little devices like the snick-o-meter. Heck, they even took the uncertainty out of the lbw – sport's equivalent of Russian roulette – by inventing an elaborate tracking system called Hawk-Eye.
Where, and how, will it end? Tennis has already become an apology of a spectator sport, with space-age-alloy-racquet-wielding steroid-boosted behemoths belting out serves that no one can see. The beeps tell you if it was in or out. And with the average player possessing the charisma of a dead halibut, you yearn for John McEnroe's line-call related tantrums, though you know he was way out of whack half the time.
If technology had been fashionable back in 1987, Sunil Gavaskar might have finished his final Test a winner. Instead, he was given out caught off the arm-guard when on 96, as India fell 16 agonising runs short of a famous victory. The cynic will tell you that he had been given a life by the umpires earlier, but we don't care either way. We savour that innings because it ended the way it did, because it gave us an excuse to shed tears as a once-in-a-lifetime hero walked off the park for the last time.
One of the greatest rivalries in sport, England-Germany in football, is based primarily on a goal that never was, a goal that proved decisive in the 1966 World Cup final. And not a season goes by without some team or the other claiming that they were cheated out of a title by some dubious offside goal.
When we walked home after our childhood games, we didn't so much talk victory and defeat as complain about how someone or the other had been sold down the river. Contentious decisions were our bones to chew on, and they didn't come any meatier than the lbw. If Hawk-Eye had been in existence, some of those 36-all-out totals would have been even more embarrassing.
Cricket's splendour lies in the fact that while the best team on the day always prevails – that doesn't happen in football or hockey, where a fluke goal can win a game – there is still plenty of opportunity to bemoan your fate: the no-ball that wasn't called, the inner edge that kissed the stumps without toppling the bails, or the leg-before that the umpire haughtily turned away. Regardless of whether you're Sachin Tendulkar or IM Pathetic, we've all been at the receiving end of what we've perceived, rightly or wrongly, as daylight robbery.
But it's not as though match officials haven't made us smile down the years. We loved Dickie Bird's quirks and his sentimentality, just as we love Pierluigi Collina's shining pate and Martian eyes. The day you bring in machines, and eliminate human error – bat-pad catches wrongly given, legal goal disallowed – what would we talk about? "We wuz robbed" is every fan's favourite theme. Take away the mistakes, and you might conceivably get perfect decisions … and no one to talk about them. We'll take our beauty with a few scars.
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