The Futility of the DRS Debate
Every time someone tells you sport is a matter of life and death, remind them of an incident such as this to make clear how stupid, insensitive, and blinkered that statement it.
Sport is many things, but it is most often and most consistently, spectacle. And the vast majority of sport fans access this spectacle via televised events held in massive purpose-built stadiums.
It is important to mention television in modern sport, because it is the primary reason for sport becoming an international behemoth of a business. Television is the reason that clubs play matches at noon so that the Chinese audience can catch, it’s the reason Test captains can afford to leave their national sides, and it’s the reason that hosting the Olympics is seen as some coming-out celebration for an entire country.
But different sports have different relationships with television. On one level – the influence of television rights in dictating priorities and budgets – is simultaneously obvious and insidious. And in fact, much of the debate surrounding television in sport, is of this nature. So just as I was about to post this, I found Rob Steen asking whether we will see broadcasters determining team selection soon.
But then there is also the aspect of how a sport is televised. The practicality of how to film the spectacle, how to edit it and how to broadcast it.
Before I get into this, let me first provide some idea of what TV production involves.
At it’s most basic, during a live show, a director (usually called a producer – go figure) has screens in front of him that are showing the different feeds available to him. He has one guy who is in charge of ‘switching’ from one view to another, another who does the same for the various audio feeds. You also need someone to be working on lining up videos – be it pre-recorded interviews or stock footage, or even a replay.
Here’s a great read on TV production for cricket on Cricinfo.
But not all sports are created equally – at least as far as TV production is concerned.
When you are filming a spectacle like sport, the idea of what represents the ‘stage’ i.e. the area where action takes place, is very fluid.
The best example of this is football – the stage is wherever the ball happens to be at any given moment. This means that despite being the richest and most popular sport on the planet, being filmed by a fascinatingly diverse wealth of creative talent and backed up by a stunning depth of financial strength, football’s coverage has largely remained static across decades now.
The primary camera is the one that sits around the half-way line, panning from one side to the other following the ball. There are a whole plethora of other cameras, which are trained on the coaches, the star player’s celebrity girl friend, the disgruntled substitute etc, but none of these are used for more than a few seconds.
The French league tries to mix things up with cameras positioned at direct angles for crosses and the Italian and German leagues frequently use the bird’s eye camera that provides some stunning views, and the Spanish league is notable for it’s slow-mo cut aways of players in a state of varying and intense emotions, but that’s about it. For the vast majority of every single televised football match that we know of, we’re watching from one angle.
(The most evocative filming of a live football match I’ve ever seen is this, but it sorely lacks any narrative thrust and needs a very open – or inebriated – mind to enjoy)
We could go into the minutiae of every different popularly televised sport, and immediately come at the restrictions in question. For example, sports that involve races – from track to swimming to F1 – all suffer from not being able to turn to any angle apart from a bird’s eye view for a period of time.This doesn’t make any of these sports better or worse, only that their televisual potential is limited.
Ijaz Butt approves of this unnecessary image insertion during an otherwise serious point of your reading experience
Contrast these then, with cricket.
Cricket’s first advantage is that although the action can take place at any part of the ground, it always begins and ends at one center stage – the pitch. The second advantage is that the stop-start is built into the game. A delivery is bowled, any variety of action takes place, and then everything stops and the next delivery begins.
The first advantage means that the narrative can be consistently relayed from a variety of angles. Every ball starts with the familiar shot taken from the pavilion, but as soon as the delivery is bowled, any number of different angles come into play. You can switch to the fielder, or a close up of the batsman, or cut to the side-on to watch the throw come in etc. By my estimation, every delivery in an ODI sees anything from 5-15 different shots being utilised. This goes up a bit for T20s, and comes down a bit for Tests. In any case, these are far more than any other sport I can think of, and crucially these are not marquee shots (such as football’s slow-mo close ups), but part of regular transmission.
The second advantage is even more important. Because the game pauses, the producer/director has time to load up a huge range of replays. A close up of the ball’s seam movement, or the batsman’s foot movement, or the stump cam, or how the fielder at cover reacted. And because there is a pause after every single event, there is a space that needs these replays. This is important when you contrast it with football, where one of the leading arguments against using replays to adjudge goal-line controversies or off-side decisions is that there isn’t any time for the referee to pause the game and view the replay.
To give you an example, have a look at this video of Dhoni’s monster six in Adelaide from a week ago. From the moment Clint McKay runs in i.e. the establishing shot for every delivery, till the moment we return to the same shot for the next ball, there are (by my count) 18 different shots. Of these, thirteen are live shots, four are replays, and one is a graphic showing the length of the six.
Not included - the spliced-in single frame penis shot
Of course, this is a pretty pivotal moment of the game, so you would expect more replays than usual. But have a look now at the first ball of the over, where Ashwin misses a flick and the ball goes through to the keeper. In contrast with the Dhoni delivery, there is little of note happening here – it’s a dot ball, and yet there are at least eight different cuts in that entire sequence.
And this televisual potential of cricket has always existed.
I had assumed that cricket coverage from the 70s would be a lot more staid – what with most youtube clips showing that infuriating angle from behind the batsman. Yet this clip of Michael Holding shows that even such notions require to be quantified. Again, going from one delivery to the next, there are at least 10 cuts. Admittedly, half of these return to the same tracking side-shot of Holding as he runs up (which is a glorious sight) and the replay is a faithful, erm, replay of the sequence that had just passed, rather than the unique shots from the previous video. But it displays quite clearly that even with relatively limited infrastructure, the very nature of the game means that the scope for a highly produced television spectacle, is unrivaled by any other sport.
The pauses in cricket, and the constant return to the centre stage – the pitch – means that you have time and reason to do a number of things without disastrously disrupting the flow of the game. In fact, to kill the dead space between deliveries, producers are compelled to provide moments of interest, be they the slips sharing a joke, or a child in the crowd, or a look at the scorecard. But if we go back to football once more, the only time we will have a whole bunch of replays and a variety of angles brought is only when there is a major incident – such as a goal, or a foul. Cricket can, and must, do this for every single delivery.
Consequently, cricket production has constantly called upon broadcasters to come up with new innovations and broadcasting techniques that keep the viewer engrossed, ranging from a chance to view the narrative of the match via run-rate worms, or the consistency of a bowler through the Hawk-Eye recreations of each delivery, or the range of the batsman via wagon-wheels. What this means is that unlike most other sports, the nexus between television and cricket continues to mold the very nature of the game itself.
The first major development – the Packer saga – was at it’s heart a television battle, one which left the game irrevocably changed. The very face and nature of the modern game would be unimaginable without the involvement of television. And once television and cricket officially became partners, they both began to influence one another in even deeper ways.
In the 80s, Pink was forcibly associated with femininity by the liberal media in order to undermine the oozing masculinity that had become synonymous with the color due to this team
The next pivotal moment in this relationship arrived around the early 90s, when broadcasters began placing side-on cameras, in a position analogous to where the square-leg umpire stood, and slow-motion technology increased in quality. Suddenly, the viewer back home could make a better decision on a run-out call than the on-field umpire.
Suddenly, it became clear that the benefit of doubt that umpires regularly gave to batsmen was no longer valid.
Over time, as slow-motion technology improved, everyone could see how vital a dive or a direct hit was. It has now gotten to a point where it’s rare for an on-field umpire to actually make a run-out call, and the margins have become so thin that issues like whether the bail has left the groove is a legitimate cricket conversation.
The point of bringing all these issues together is to understand the nature of the DRS debate.
In many ways, the development of the DRS arose from the exact same exigencies that led to the third umpire being used – it was a range of technologies that was available to viewers before it became part of the game, it altered the inherent bias towards the batsman, and it showed that umpires could start being ruthless rather than cautious. Yet (and perhaps the absence of 24-hour TV and the internet is to blame for this) there was never such gut-wrenching soul-searches, and cricket board brouhahas, associated with the third umpire. Just like the DRS the initial deployment was not exact or even, and the technology was developed over time, but once the technology became available, it was impossible for cricket to continue without it. If before you felt that your star player had been wrongly given out by the crooked umpire, now (you believed) you had evidence that the decision had been a dodgy one.
The greatest point to take away from all this, and one that is continuously ignored, is that once the viewers could see that an incorrect decision had been reached, it was impossible to shut Pandora’s Box. The DRS debate, as it stands, still pretends that it’s about whether it should be used or not. It’s also a debate which ignores the history of television’s influence on the game.
Ever since Hawk-eye came into the picture, and TV companies started showing that bar which runs from wicket to wicket, any viewer could immediately tell if the wrong LBW decision ‘seemed’ to have been made. The arrival of HotSpot and less conclusively, Snicko, meant that caught-behinds were also added to the fray. This did not mean that the television technology was perfect, but rather than once it was available, it began to influence the very nature of how each decision was viewed. If you got some decisions wrong, television channels would call you cheaters and kabootars [pigeons] with the allegations ringing out amidst the harrowing soundtrack from Requiem for a Dream. No really.
The turning point of this development was the 2008 Indian tour of Australia. Having a look back at the decisions highlighted in this video, very few of them are of the nature that can be conclusively corrected with the DRS system as it stands right now. Yet the reason that there was such controversy was because the viewer could see that there was a problem, and because of the level of technology available to scrutinise each decision, the rage felt by fans was amplified at a level never seen before. Since then, it became inevitable that the technology available to the viewer would have to be made part of the game itself.
Cricket viewers, more so than any other sports fan, are used to radical changes in their sport, and they are used to television technologies pushing forth those changes. When it comes to the DRS, for all the chest-beating about inconsistencies in the implementation of the system, or which board uses it, or who splits the cost, or anything else, the argument is already over.
We are in the future, and there’s no going back.
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