India vs Australia: MD of Virtual-Eye technology admits ‘ball-tracking’ error made during SCG Test


India vs Australia: MD of Virtual-Eye technology admits ‘ball-tracking’ error made during SCG Test
Ravichandran Ashwin celebrates Steve Smith's wicket
Ravichandran Ashwin and Steve Smith

During the third Test of the recently-concluded series between India and Australia, a contentious call by the ‘Ball-Tracking’ technology was noticed by eagle-eyed Twitter users. In Australia’s 2nd innings, in an over bowled by Ravichandran Ashwin, Steve Smith missed a sweep off a stock ball from the offie and the appeal from the Indian team was turned down by the umpire. Skipper Ajinkya Rahane wasn’t convinced but Ashwin persuaded him to go for the review.

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The ball-tracking showed that the ball had pitched in-line and gone on to marginally clip the stumps. This led to the decision of ‘Not-Out’ to stand due to an ‘Umpire’s Call’. Therefore, India also retained their review. However, a closer look at the ball-tracking showed that there was no chance the ball would have clipped the stumps as it was going well wide of leg-stump. There seemed to be a superimposed fourth stump that the ball clipped.

‘It was a human error’

The contentious Hawk-Eye call

Now, the MD of ‘Virtual Eye’ which handles ball-tracking technologies in Australia and New Zealand has admitted that an error was made and also pointed out the reason for the same. “We reported that immediately to the people we work with at the ICC because it was a mistake on our part — fortunately it did not affect the decision, the umpire was correct, but is should not have happened. We take full responsibility for that but the important thing was that the decision to stay with the umpires call was the correct one — the real ball track did show the ball missed,” Ian Taylor, the MD told Cricbuzz.

He then revealed the reason for the error saying, “We tracked the ball normally in our tracking system and it showed it missing the stumps. For the DRS the next step is to play the ball track back, superimposed over the ‘end on’ broadcast TV camera when the 3rd umpire calls for it. At the start of play we calibrate the two TV cameras at each end of the pitch to ensure they are perfectly aligned when we play our ball track over the live camera. When we did that, before going to air, it was fine and the ball was clearly missing,” he said.

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“Just before we were going to replay, the end-on camera lost focus for an instant and when that happens it loses its calibration and we have to recalibrate. It happens a few times during the day but this was the first time it had ever happened between the time we tracked the ball and the time we had to replay it,” Taylor added. “It was human error on our part. Fortunately, the error was within the ‘umpires call’ margin so the result stood — as it should have, because the ball in our track was missing the stumps,” he further said.

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