The Downside of Improvements

Somebody up there must have been looking out for me yesterday. I was short the Nifty and was supposed to cut the short positions and go long above the first hours high. The Nifty did not move above the high and in fact fell sharply to give me my first MTM profit in days. I will cut my short position and go long only above 5250.

Now that I have dispensed off with the market part of the note I can bring my full attention to play on what I have been itching to write. I have been thinking for some time now about the use of technology in the game of cricket. Many intelligent people have been propagating the use of technology saying it improves the decision making process by giving players a chance to review the obvious errors that umpires make. However, the BCCI has been vehemently and sometimes seemingly stubbornly opposing its use. The reasons they have stated include silly ones like the technology is not 100% accurate. This argument is clearly a stupid because if we always waited for 100% accuracy in technology before adopting it, then we human beings would still have been in the stone age. All improvements clearly are stepped processes and any new technology can only be an improvement over the exising one. Never ever can it be 100% accurate or foolproof.

Despite the overwhelming evidence against the BCCI stance, I maintain that they are right in refusing the use of this Decision Review System for one simple reason. Have you seen the number of lbw decisions that the bowlers get these days? Have you seen Ricky Pontings average before DRS and after DRS? Before DRS he would invariably get away with a lot of close lbw decisions. The umpires were always kind to him. After the first few breaks he would inevitably hit a big hundred. Now he hardly manages to get to double figures before some bowler manages to trap him lbw. But India does not use DRS and look at what happened. Tendulkar got away with a clear lbw yesterday. Now, who is more intelligent- the world or the BCCI?

Very soon it will be clear to the rest of the Boards too that this improvement in the decision making process has led to a decline in batting averages. It will then become clear that statistics will have to be looked at as BeforeDRS and AfterDRS. All batting records BDRS will lose their shine a little bit and all bowling records BDRS will start looking a little better. When it starts impacting their respective batting heroes these boards will quietly do a U Turn and the DRS will die a quiet death.

This downside of improvements happens not just in cricket but in other spheres too. But that is a note for another day. After all I am a daily note writer and need some ammunition for some other time too.

So I remain short and pray that some politician makes some negative noises.