Hawkeye sceptic turns Hawkeye advocate
16-Jul-2014
Mike Selvey travels to Basingstoke to meet Steve Carter, the managing director of Hawk-Eye Innovations. Following a demonstration of Hawkeye, Selvey writes in the Guardian that his doubts over the technology have vanished. He maintains, however, that the implementation of the Decision Review System remains far from perfect.
I was shown one further thing. A split screen showed an empty indoor net and two deliveries from a leg-spinner. Each pitched and turned from leg to off, and the picture was then frozen at the point of what would have been impact with a pad in a neutral position. One was striking at about half-stump height, the other maybe two-thirds high. What did I think happened next ?
The first, I suggested, would probably be deemed hitting near the top of the stumps and the second clearing, but I suspected that they were in fact the same delivery filmed from a different height. This was indeed the case, and it showed how wrong we can be when we look incredulous when a ball we think is clearly going to hit is shown to be clearing them by a distance: both were hitting. The perspective is entirely contingent on the height of the camera behind the arm, the lower the camera the better. An ideal one would be in the top of the middle stump at either end.