Wimbledon’s Hawk-Eye controversies were human-made and technology’s role in refereeing sports will only grow, writes Ed Warner.
In the chalk dust v Hawk-Eye battle there can only be one winner. Traditionalists may hanker after a Wimbledon of line judges, temper tantrums, smashed rackets and John McEnroe questioning the seriousness of the umpire but in tennis, as in all sports, technology’s march is unstoppable.
That All England Club chair Debbie Jevans and her CEO were both pressed to defend this year’s inaugural use of tech to make all line calls was laughable. On the plus side for them, the hoo-hah over a couple of glitches is probably an indication that The Championships have otherwise been running smoothly.
A Brit making it past the second Tuesday in the singles would have been a welcome distraction for the AELTC’s leadership, but responsibility for home-grown success anyway lies with the Lawn Tennis Association rather than Wimbledon’s organisers.
It is ironic that the first of two controversial Hawk-Eye incidents (Pavlyuchenkova v Kartal) was the result of human error. After all, the whole point of the exercise is to eliminate human frailty. Someone, though, needs to ensure the on switch is always depressed.
The second (Fritz v Khachanov) also involved human interference, this time the inadvertent movement of a BBG – ball boy or girl, for those of you not up with your tennis acronyms.
That’s two cock-ups in, so far, 10 days of tennis across 18 courts. Last year there were 104,863 strokes played on the show courts alone in the fortnight of competition.
Players want accuracy. Technology delivers it, provided operators aren’t asleep at the controls and BBG shuttles are accurately scoped by the techies.
Give it a few years and the ball boys and girls will doubtless be history too. Who will be first to patent a system to suck stray balls into courtside receptacles? James Dyson?
Broadcasters, by contrast, crave drama and controversy. Pundits across sport may rail against perceived flaws – human or technological – in officiating, but they need something to complain about to enliven their coverage and rouse their sofa-bound audiences.
It is here that the interests of fans and TV companies may diverge. What do I want as a spectator? Accuracy, yes, but also speed of decision-making.
Enough with the slow choreography of the DRS in cricket, the laboured exchange between rugby referee and TMO, the interminable delay while the VAR draws their lines or the ref squints into a pitchside monitor. Please give us back spontaneity.
None of these delays are the fault of the technology (if blame can ever anyway be ascribed to lines of code). Strip away the human intervention and give us instantaneous results. In most cases, the computer has them before athletes and officials have taken their next breath.
In time, the role of officials in many arenas will be narrowed to on-field athlete control and subjective judgements in sports involving contact.
Every delivery in cricket could be adjudicated by computer, umpires reduced to looking after the bowler’s cap, preventing damage to the wicket and de-escalating tension between players.
Athletics could have a field of play entirely devoid of officials. Football might put referee’s assistants out to pasture, or restrict their role to that of additional eyes and ears for their on-field boss who is focused purely on adjudicating contact.
Soon enough, sports dependent on judging will also replace humans with algorithms. Pity the judges in diving who award marks with the naked eye and no recourse to slow-motion replays.
Why not feed the contours of a dive and its technical difficulty into a computer and let the software spew out a score based on instant analysis of imagery captured from multiple camera angles?
Ditto gymnastics and dressage. Combat sports could use sensors and imagery to reduce the role of officials to stepping in to ensure safety.
This may all sound surreal, but it is a future that is almost upon us – and one that will not feel at all strange to younger generations raised on gaming, who can barely remember a time before Hawk-Eye and VAR. Chalk dust? What’s that?
Relive John McEnroe’s iconic 1981 Wimbledon rant here.
Captive pundit
My first thought on hearing Tim Henman describe criticism of the automated line call system as “utter garbage” was that he had to say that. After all, Henman is an All England Club main board member.
The BBC employs the former British No1 as one of its main tennis pundits, one of many examples across sport of stars with conflicts of interest pronouncing on events and athletes with which they have relationships. Usually, at some point during lengthy coverage, such conflicts are cited, but many at home will miss the reference. Viewer beware.
Such relationships are not without frustration on all sides. In my time in athletics there were occasions when members of the broadcast “talent” had formal relationships with the governing body and athletes which appeared to do nothing to temper on-air criticisms of the GB team. More fool us, I guess.
And while on the subject, it will be interesting to see whether the BBC employs Michael Johnson as one of its pundit roster for this summer’s World Athletics Championships given media reports that some of the athletes who will compete there are still awaiting payments for taking part in his curtailed Grand Slam Track series. Front Office Sports cites unpaid fees totalling $13m.
Flights of fancy
Fifa backed the right horses in cobbling together its expanded Club World Cup. Two heavyweight European teams will contest Sunday’s final.
Both received $38.2m just for taking part, the biggest available sum in a tiered ranking that saw the qualifiers from Oceania pick up under a 10th of that amount for jetting into America.
Only when Fifa treats all qualifiers equally, and the biggest clubs still want to turn up, will this World Cup have true credibility.
Ed Warner is chair of GB Wheelchair Rugby and writes his sport column at sportinc.substack.com
