Let cricket remain quirky, annoying and enthralling

Earlier posts: Intro, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10.

Some of those who continue to bang on about the glory of technology and the need to embrace it have an irritating tendency to ridicule those who oppose it, portraying them as conservative Luddites who are incapable of embracing change. Technology used wisely is good. Used because it exists, it is not so wonderful.

As requested by Amit Varma, I read the article "The Perfect Solution Fallacy". Interesting. Not sure what relevance it has to this debate, but interesting. If we start discussing seat belts I will be sure to revisit it.

Seriously, the examples flagged are not relevant. Clearly, if implementing something, however flawed, can save lives then it is better than nothing at all. Few would disagree. But we are talking about cricket and not terrorism or drunken drivers.

The issue I have with technology is that it does not necessarily bring advantages. In a sport, where it is not life-or-death, you can demand a higher level of perfection, and I would argue that the technology is far from perfect.

The much-touted Hawk-Eye is a good example. It relies on pinpoint calibration and, according to those who have far more working knowledge of it that I do, has its fair share of glitches. Those can be resolved. Endless test can probably quell the doubts that many continue to have about its predictive accuracy. Hell, the tedious delays can even be eliminated.

But, and it is a big but, the charm of sport is the uncertainty. It might irritate the buggery out of us, but even those who demand perfection in sport should consider the consequences. As I said in my earlier post, we all thrive on the morning-after debate about incidents. Offices and bars would be pretty quiet without them. I don't want an ideal world. I like sport being quirky, annoying and enthralling, and I like moaning about referees and umpires! And mistakes by officials always leave me with a gilt-edged way of avoiding the unpalatable truth about my team ... and even my own sporting abilities!

If it was then football, rugby, baseball - and many other sports where calls are far more black and white - would have embraced it. That they haven't is because they realise that it brings with it a whole new set of problems.

If Hawk-Eye, the snickometer and endless replays are allowed, then Amit and his like should consider one thing. Two separate games would emerge. International cricket would become a different beast to anything else, run using machines where the rest of world cricket relied on the laughingly-outmoded human being. With no element of doubt, international matches would be shorter and bowlers would probably get a slight advantage. But at any other level it would be business as usual.

Would sponsors and the money-orientated boards welcome shorter matches? About as much as a chicken welcomes a fox in its coup. Solving one problem (and many would argue there wasn't really a problem), a whole bunch more would be created. Maybe a machine somewhere could be used to find a solution.