Ending its long-standing opposition to the Decision Review System (DRS), the BCCI yesterday agreed to its usage on a trial basis during India’s home Test series against England starting next month
Anil Kumble
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New Delhi: Ending its long-standing opposition to the Decision Review System (DRS), the BCCI yesterday agreed to its usage on a trial basis during India’s home Test series against England starting next month.
“The Board of Control for Cricket in India will deploy the Decision Review System, 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 said in a statement.
The BCCI and India’s limited-overs skipper Mahendra Singh Dhoni have long opposed the system. But the Board’s stance has softened after Test captain Virat Kohli and coach Anil Kumble expressed their openness to experiment with the technology.
Kumble, who heads the ICC Cricket Committee, visited the MIT Laboratory last year to assess the upgraded research on ball tracking technology and the contentious Hot Spot, which had been called unreliable by the BCCI in the past.
India last played a Test series with DRS in use was way back in 2008 when they played an away series against Sri Lanka. The Board said in a recent meeting with the ICC and the Hawkeye officials, the improvements made to the system were further evaluated by the BCCI team. The Board said that it was “satisfied” that most of the concerns and suggestions that were expressed by it over a period of time, were “addressed to a significant extent.”
The significant changes, which have been effected, include the introduction of ultramotion cameras which will address issues with regard to calculating the predictive path which allows the ball tracking, to be more accurate.
Another change was manual intervention to set the impact point has been controlled by the introduction of the ‘Ultra edge’ which has been approved by MIT and will help in determining the frame of impact.
“Ultraedge also ensures that post impact, balls do not affect the predicted path or impact point and hence the accuracy has been improved,” the Indian cricket board stated.