Geoff Allardice, General Manager of Cricket Affairs of the International Cricket Council (ICC), has said team India head coach Anil Kumble’s role has been instrumental in India embracing the Decision Review System in the upcoming Test series against Alastair Cook-led England. Allardice revealed the former Indian leggie also played a decisive role in assessing the modified system.
Before becoming the head coach of the national team, Kumble was the chairman of ICC’s Cricket Committee and went to MIT, where the existing DRS was upgraded. Kumble’s history with the system assured the BCCI to give their nod to the implementation of the system.The cricket board had always expressed their reservation over the system but decided to go ahead with it in the series on a ‘trial basis’.
Interacting with media, Allardice said: “I know he’s (Kumble) been part of the pre-committee for I think four years now, and one of the things that he was keen to do when he came on as chairman was to make sure that the technologies that were used as part of DRS were assessed independently and he’s driven a lot of that project and it’s taken awhile to get to the stage where we’ve got results of testing, etc.
Praising Kumble for his support for the system, Allardice said: “He has been very supportive of the project. He was also in the pre-committee meeting in May last year when the results when the majority of the tests were presented. He was aware of the pre committee’s position, which was that they wanted a more consistent use of technology across international matches.
“The fact that he was subsequently appointed as Indian coach; he obviously has that background going into his coaching position. He’s been very instrumental in the process that we’ve taken with the assessment of technology and the approval process and new technologies and things like that; he’s taken a methodical approach,” Allardice added.
In absence of HotSpot, UltraEdge will help the umpires to find out about the ‘frame of impact’. The BCCI, which has always remained reluctant to implement the DRS due to their lack of confidence in ball tracking technology, was convinced to use it in the upcoming series only after seeing the new technology which was implemented in the game in 2015.
“I think it was an opportunity to talk to the BCCI about what some of those developments have been, and about how some of those developments have probably appeased some of the concerns they have had around performance of the technologies, particularly in the area of ball tracking.
“The two of note which you will have seen are the increased frame rate of the cameras, obviously puts more information into each calculation of a predicted path and produces a more accurate result, and the location of the point of impact now has the ultra edge or the sound based system helping them getting the right frame of impact.
“They are two improvements in the last couple of years that have certainly improved the performance of ball tracking since the BCCI originally took its position a few years ago,” he concluded.