BCCI says yes to D RS

MUMBAI: After years of opposition, the BCCI seems to have warmed up to the Decision Review System (DRS).

The Indian Board on Friday agreed to use the system on a trial basis during the five-match Test series against England in November.

“The Board will deploy DRS in toto in the forthcoming series starting Nov 9 on a trial basis to evaluate the improvements made to the system over a period of time,” the BCCI said in a statement.

The Board has been opposing the DRS since 2008, when India featured in a non-ICC event against Sri Lanka. The system had come for criticism from the Board and then-Test skipper MS Dhoni after several decisions went against the team.

The perception appears to have changed since skipper Virat Kohli and coach Anil Kumble came together.

Incidentally, Kumble also heads the ICC Cricket Committee, which visited the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) last year to assess an upgraded version of the system with revised balltracking technology and ‘hot spot’, areas which the BCCI had taken termed “unreliable” in the past.

EVALUATED

In a recent meeting with the ICC and Hawkeye officials, the improvements were further evaluated by the BCCI team.

The Board said it was “satisfied” that most of the concerns and suggestions expressed by it were “addressed to a significant extent”.

The upgraded version of the DRS now includes ultra-motion cameras, which will address issues regarding calculating the predictive path.

Another change was manual intervention to set the impact point, and has been controlled by the introduction of the ‘ultra edge’.

“Ultra edge also ensures that post impact balls do not affect the predicted path or impact point and hence the accuracy has been improved,” the BCCI stated.

“Earlier, there was a possibility that the operator would have missed a delivery and hence a LBW appeal could have been missed. Now, Hawkeye has developed the technology to record and save all images so that in case an operator fails to arm the tracking system, the images can be rewound and replayed.”

The Board said additional cameras have been installed so that there is “redundancy and also provide 100 per cent reliable spin vision for DRS.”