Bird's eye better than Hawkeye

By Rob Bonnet BBC Sport

It was good to see former Test umpire Harold "Dickie" Bird at a Commonwealth broadcasters' conference in Manchester during the week - and I was delighted he could see me.

He is reporting a 90% return to full sight following a traumatic temporary blindness during the winter.

And he is optimistic of further improvement still - all of which left Dickie back to his clucking and muttering best.

And cluck and mutter he did in a discussion group about "Hawkeye", the ball-tracking device used by Channel 4's cricket coverage.

Wimbledon must fear that technology would undermine the umpire's authority

Rob Bonnet

The computer-generated system traces the wicket-to-wicket flight of the ball, and projects its path when it is critically interrupted by the intervention of a pad.

According to inventor Dr Paul Hawkins, Hawkeye has applications beyond mere viewer enlightenment.

Why not, he asked, allow umpires to use it?

Especially since roughly half of the lbw dismissals reviewed by Hawkeye last year were deemed faulty, usually because the ball was shown to have been travelling over the stumps.

You've got to believe in the technology, of course, and while Dr Hawkins thankfully declined to confuse us with scientific mumbo-jumbo, he had me going a bit with claims of "100% accuracy to within 5 millimetres".

But believe it we increasingly do, leaving us with the practical objections of further delay to play.

Showboater

No problem. Umpires can have access to a decision within two seconds on their own miniature monitor, without recourse to the third umpire.

Ethical objections? Well, Dickie Bird, for one, has clearly softened his initial scorn.

But the idea that he and his colleagues should be left merely to shift six pebbles from one coat pocket to another put him into a flat spin.

With a glum look at the suggestion that machines will soon make all the decisions, he said ruefully that he was glad he'd done his umpiring before the arrival of all this new technology.

I had to agree.

I've enjoyed Dickie Bird's umpiring.

Dickie Bird defends the role of the umpire

Yes, he was a bit of a showboater, maybe even forgetful from time to time of the fact that the public pay above all to see the players, not the officials.

But he was entertaining and authoritative, and liked and respected within a game that certainly needs all the characters it can get.

And Dickie - of course - had unashamed sentimentality for cricket in tearful bucketloads.

Try wringing that out of computer software!

The International Cricket Council is set to expand the game's reliance on technology at the Champions Trophy event in Sri Lanka later this year.

I think this experiment in balance between human intuition and scientific accuracy will be a success.

But for the time being at least, Hawkeye's role will only be to enhance the viewers' understanding of cricket on Channel 4 and Stella Artois tennis from Queen's Club on the BBC, though not - intriguingly - from the Wimbledon Championships.

The All England club must be afraid that technology would undermine, rather than enhance, the authority of the umpire.

Serious? They can't be!