BRING IT ON, TECHNOLOGY WILL IMPROVE THE SPECTACLE

I’m all in favour of technology that works beyond all reasonable doubt and doesn’t excessively interrupt the natural flow of a game, so my gut instinct is to support any proposed use of Hawk-Eye technology to police offside. Sports need to develop and evolve. Hawk-Eye has added immeasurably to my enjoyment of watching cricket in recent years and it was worth that little clunky interim period where the TV guys refined it and worked with the umpires and players to formulate the correct protocol. The technology is already being used to help the TmO adjudicate on try decisions and when you watch a game on TV it seems pretty clear there is the potential to switch some of that technology to policing offside, particularly with back divisions advancing too soon and cross-field kicks to wings. In one sense we already do it in the TV studios as best we can, trying to freeze the frame and draw lines but we don’t always have the correct angles and perspective and sometimes, in the case of a kick wide to the wing, we don’t always have the kicker and catcher in the same frame, from the right angle, at the precise moment the ball is kicked. Hawk-Eye can have all their camera angles, including more from overhead, lined up precisely in advance and the split-screen images can by synchronised. The potential to make the right call is clearly there. This could really come into its own concerning defensive back divisions. The rugby field is congested enough as it is and those crowded midfields — with perhaps a couple of defenders offside — can really affect a game. That midfield congestion is also one of the reasons we are getting more of these head-on-head clashes. It can be so claustrophobic that the ball receiver scarcely has time to react. The tackler gets man and ball more and more often and if that defender has started from an offside position it is unfair. The other obvious use is checking interception tries like Gareth Davies’ against australia on Saturday when somebody races out of the line in anticipation of a pass from a lineout or scrum. I firmly believe Davies was onside from the pictures I saw, but Hawk-Eye could be set up to make a definitive ruling. I don’t see too many downsides but one possible issue is that the technology presumably is not cheap and would initially only be available at big Test matches. How quickly could it be rolled out to the club game, the Premiership and the European Cup? If it isn’t applied universally at the elite level there could be an element of players having to adapt to slightly different interpretations of the laws every week. Finally, I’m pretty sure Hawk-Eye could be set up to tell us straight away whether a pass was forward or not which sounds great — I can hear you all cheering — but there are so many close calls with passes these days that it could be very intrusive and disrupt the flow of play too much. That might be a step too far. We would need to think that one through carefully.