I no longer use a typewriter to write my columns or anything else. We no longer travel in bullock carts (what Gandhi called ‘OxFord’ in the movie named after him), or curse when the weather means we can’t read the time off the sun-dial.
We move on, replacing the old and cumbersome, perhaps even inaccurate systems with the new and convenient, and above all more accurate ones. In cricket, India clung to their anti-DRS stand for long (possibly because a couple of senior players were seen to be out when they acted as if they weren’t). But they finally gave in.
Australian Open tennis in 2021, the U.S. Open in 2022 and Wimbledon this year all adopted the Electronic Line Calling (ELC) system with two important consequences. One, linesmen were no longer needed, and two, calls were accepted as being mostly accurate. There was a third consequence too — the sight of three people staring at a spot on court on live television was gone. The image had rare slapstick value.
Now the French Open authorities say that the slapstick will continue for another year. Line judges will keep their jobs next year to “show off the excellence of French umpiring.” The ELC, like all such systems is not always a hundred per cent right; there is a small margin of error. But players are beginning to trust it more than the often tired and sometimes older line judges.
Technology explains how tennis balls compress when they land. The marks they leave on clay, for instance, do not tell the full story of the impact. Human judges cannot always work that out in a split second. The maths is too complicated for that.The ELC does not allow the pressure situation of a match to get to it, leading to wrong calls. Livelihoods often dependon a linesman getting a call right.
All electronic systems have teething troubles. Equipment malfunction can scupper the best plans. There exist integration problems too. At Wimbledon, during the Taylor Fritz quarterfinal, a ball boy, still on court when the service action began, prevented the ELC from recognising the start of a point. Sometimes a call is too soft for anyone to hear.
Fritz’s opponent in that quarterfinal, Karen Khachanov said the reliance on machines was “scary”.British players Jack Draper and Emma Raducanu have also raised concerns. Iga Swiatek had some misgivings but is largely in favour. Many of the errors have been traced to human shortcomings, like inadvertently deactivating the system.
It is the lack of the human touch that worries nay-sayers the most. In football, the Video Assistant Referee (VAR) system sees a conversation between the on-field referee and the assistant off it. Cricket’s DRS has the ‘umpire’s call’. Tennis’s ELC has no higher court of appeal.
The ELC or a superior version will finally be accepted everywhere. That is the nature of these things. Waiting for a system to become perfect is futile. After all, the early cars and first computers and original watches aren’t the ones we use today.
Published on Oct 15, 2025