Peter Hayter column – Robo-ump will need his smart phone and new app!

Assuming the reports in The Times weren’t part of a late April fool’s gag, if the inventor of Hawk-Eye technology has his way, club cricket could soon be revolutionised by the introduction of “a cheap new sensor that can be attached to bats to detect the tiniest edge”.

For, £25 a pop at most (but possibly less), the boffin who brought us the joys of DRS now wants to offer to club cricket the gift of certainty when it comes to even the faintest, featheriest of nicks, thus making the curse of non-walking a thing of the past.

The science is certainly not to be sniffed at. The new gizmo, which has produced impressive test results, has been developed by Paul Hawkins, the former county player and missile guidance expert who invented the ball-tracking system now used widely in world cricket and who says he is close to making it available for public use.

As well as detecting edges, it can be fixed easily to a bat and linked to an app on the umpire’s smart phone attached to their white coats, with which they can also “record each ball using the phone’s camera, giving them access to instant replays and, in the case of lbw appeals, showing them where the ball had pitched and whether it would have hit the stumps”.

All well and good so long as the umpire in question possesses a smart phone, remembers to switch it on, and actually knows what an app is.

I can see it now; in club houses all over the nation, the two hapless officials, browbeaten by the champions of progress into taking on the role of Robo-umps, making sure they have everything they need prior to the commencement of play.

Ball? Check. Bails? Check. Pebbles – six? Check. Flashlight to signal for Betty to stick the kettle on at tea-time and for Harry to fire up the boiler for the showers? Check. Smart phone? Check.

Oh, and did you check with the players that all that the sensors really are sensors because we don’t want a repeat of last week’s unpleasantness when that lad came out with a device the size of 1p coin on his bat that actually was a 1p coin?

And out in the middle, consider a few of the following scenarios, some, it has to be said, more likely than others; system unavailable due to match being played in poor reception area (Wally says he can get a signal if he stands on Ranjit’s shoulders in the next field but watch out for the randy bull), battery power below ten per cent, unpaid ‘phone bill,  phone rings in mid-delivery (umpire’s girlfriend calling to remind him to pick up the chicken massala and onion bhajis on the way home), phone starts picking up short-wave radio from the station mini-cab firm, phone sets off pavilion burglar alarm, phone unintentionally reactivates missile guidance technology Hawkins thought he had deleted from the system which starts pre-emptive nuclear strike from local airbase.

Now I’m no Luddite. I enjoy a good decision review as much as the next man, as long as the next man is a member of the Board of Control for Cricket in India, but please, enough is enough.

Hawkins explains that his determination to proceed with this deepened following yet another personal experience of batsmen declining to depart the field of play when they know they’ve hit the cover off the ball. “We got him out soon afterwards, but it ruined my day,” he said and we’ve all been there.

I have another idea, however. From now on, everybody walks. Now that would be revolutionary.

This piece originally featured in The Cricket Paper, Friday April 29 2016