JOIN USAfter sending out several feelers over the past couple of months, the Board of Control for Cricket in India finally confirmed that the Decision Review System will be used on a trial basis for the upcoming home Test series against England.
“The Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) will deploy the Decision Review System (DRS), in toto, in the forthcoming series between India and England starting from the 9th of Nov 2016, on a trial basis to evaluate the improvements made to the system over a period of time,” the Board stated.
“In the meeting with the ICC and the Hawkeye officials, the improvements made to the system were further evaluated by the BCCI team, who were satisfied that most of the concerns and suggestions that were expressed by BCCI over a period of time, were addressed to a significant extent.”
After their bad experience with DRS in Sri Lanka in 2008, when it was still in its early stages, India have steadfastly refused to embrace it, barring ICC events and a Test series against England in 2011. The Board and former Test skipper M S Dhoni have always felt that DRS is not “foolproof”.
However, with new men in charge, there seems to be a change of heart as well. New Test skipper Virat Kohli has often said he is keen on using technology, while coach Anil Kumble, the head of ICC’s cricket committee, had visited the MIT that has been studying methods to make DRS better.
“We are happy to note that Hawkeye has institutionalised all the recommendations made by BCCI,” said Board president Anurag Thakur. “We recognise the enhanced role of technology in sport and BCCI will lead such initiatives in the coming days and enrich viewer experience.”
The significant changes which have been effected are the introduction of ultra-motion cameras and ultra-edge. While ultra-motion cameras will address issues with regard to calculating the predictive path which allows ball-tracking to be more accurate, ultra-edge ensures that post impact balls do not affect the predicted path or impact point.
Earlier, there was a possibility that the operator would have missed a delivery and hence an LBW appeal could have been missed. Now, Hawkeye has developed the technology to record and save all the images so that in case an operator fails to arm the tracking system, the images can be rewound and replayed.
India will host England for five Test matches with the first game starting in Rajkot on November 9. The other matches are at Visakhapatnam (Nov 17-21), Mohali (Nov 26-30), Mumbai (Dec 8-12) and Chennai (Dec 16-20). England will go back home for Christmas and then return to India in January for three ODIs and an equal number of T20s.