This week the BCCI has built on some of the arguments that have hitherto been attributed to it and India's players with respect to the Decision Review System. Niranjan Shah, at one time the Secretary of the BCCI (a successor to the powerful and comical J Y Lele) and now a Vice President of BCCI makes a detailed and coherent argument on DNA. You may or may not agree with it, but unlike the totally arbitrary, unsupported statement from Dave Richardson ("The level of believability in ball-tracking systems has improved"), Mr. Shah has actually offered an argument - a rationale, which we have some way of assessing. Earlier this week, a report by Lokendra Pratap Sahi about DRS included a clarification by BCCI that it “does not accept the reliability of the ball-tracking technology, which is an integral part of the DRS.”. It is worth going into what Mr. Shah says in some detail.
Mr. Shah basically makes the following claims:
1. DRS is not foolproof, or 100% accurate. The gains through DRS are marginal, and the costs of the system does not justify such marginal gains.
2. The system requires about $ 60,000 per day. There were 65 Tests and 170 ODIs played last year. The DRS bill would come to about $30 million based on such a rate.
3. There is currently no competition amongst vendors of technology.
4. Cricket has survived despite partisan umpires, and for Mr. Shah, the human element must be preserved.
5. The Player Review limits the number of times DRS can be used. For all this money, it doesn't even work all the time. Once a side has exhausted its reviews, subsequent errors continue to go unchecked.
It goes on. I recommend a careful, critical reading.
Mr. Shah is most incisive when he goes after the ICC for preventing competition. The ICC Cricket Committee's review of DRS has been a joke. There was no independent assessment, and only 1 of the vendors made a presentation. Mr. Stephen Carter. This cannot be stressed enough. The ICC has not seriously, independently, evaluated ball-tracking technology.
The one area where I disagree with Mr. Shah is in his pessimism related to use of technology to look for obvious mistakes. It is possible to use it, and some of the technology for DRS is already in place even in situations where DRS is not used. For example, ball-tracking is available in the West Indies even though DRS is not being used.
While BCCI may have a good argument against DRS, it will serve them well if they propose an alternative to improving decision making and using technology to do so. But they have, as of now, made more coherent arguments in the debate than the ICC (through Mr. Richardson or Mr. Lorgat or anybody else) or the ECB or anybody else.
Here's the extent of the arguments offered by most people (not all, there are some exceptions) who support DRS.
First, it is claimed that DRS should be used in its current form because it is good for the game. Why is it good for the game? Because it improves decision making. Does it do so efficiently? Here the answer has to be mixed in the face of 3 years of tested and accumulated evidence. The argument usually comes down to a final, so far unanswerable question from my position - Why should DRS still be used in its current form if it is a bad way to solve a stated problem?
For the England players, it has been a simple equation. DRS is good because they get more decisions. Remarkably, a lot of cricket writers think this is a reasonable argument!
Given my plea for a debate about DRS, Mr. Shah's arguments have been a pleasant surprise. He has presented the economic side of things - a side which I knew nothing about so far. That is a fine contribution.
Now if only Mr. Richardson could publish a long 6000 word article detailing the history of the development of DRS, and explaining why it has occured according to highest, most rigorous standards of developing a information technology solution.
If only!