The fading human touch in tennis' electronic line-calling system

Hindustan Times

2 days ago

Mumbai: This was Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova's response when asked how she would have felt if that point, which has since become the talking point of Wimbledon, cost her the match: 'I would just say that I hate Wimbledon and never come back here.' Members of the public watch the a player training on court 16 on the eighth day of the 2025 Wimbledon Championships at The All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club in Wimbledon, southwest London, on July 7, 2025. (Photo by HENRY NICHOLLS / AFP) / RESTRICTED TO EDITORIAL USE (AFP)
Pavlyuchenkova could later chuckle about it because she could be human about it (and, well, because it didn't cost her the match).
That human touch has, incidentally, gone missing around the on-court officiating system at Wimbledon. At, ironically, a Grand Slam which prides on tradition.
After 147 years of existence, Wimbledon has done away with line judges – those crisply-dressed men and women scattered around the green that sprung to life the theatre around line calls and debatable decisions. They've been replaced by 12 cameras per court for an electronic line-calling system beaming on 144 screens in a room operated by 50-odd humans.
That's not quite the problem, for, other than the French Open, all Slams and many ATP and WTA tournaments now have this system in place. That this system was absent for practically one full game for calls on half of the Centre Court also wasn't the pressing problem (unless, of course, you're Pavlyuchenkova who had to replay a game point she had won before losing the point and the game).
The biggest problem was that no one on that court, including the chair umpire and the players, could do anything about it. That wasn't the case before, even in this modern era of Hawk-Eye technology that added to the human eye and aided players seeking to challenge the latter.
That's where tennis as a whole, and specifically this Wimbledon, has drifted away from the human touch of sport.
In football's Video Assistant Referee (VAR) system, also much-debated, there's still dialogue between the referee on the pitch and the virtual assistance off it. In cricket's Decision Review System (DRS), the on-field umpire's call still plays a key role in LBW decisions.
On the most crucial point of that 4-4 game, in the most obvious 'out' call that the electronic system wasn't up and running to detect, the chair umpire could do little but pause and replay the point. That's in contrast to what umpires and judges have done for years: make calls.
World No.5 Taylor Fritz had the most basic question about the incident: 'The chair umpire has to make the call. Why is he there if he's not going to call the ball?'
When technology is asleep or misfiring – which, statistically, is a miniscule percentage of the total calls – there has to be a case for the human to take over. Not partially, like it was in this case, but totally.
'That's why we have a chair umpire. Otherwise, I think soon let's just play without them and then we're going to have everything automatic,' Pavlyuchenkova said. 'I think we are losing a little bit of the charm of actually having human beings… it just becomes a little bit weird and robot orientated.'
The players themselves don't seem to be big fans of this 'robot oriented' system. The debate, as per Belinda Bencic, is a hot topic in locker rooms. In this Wimbledon alone, multiple players have questioned the accuracy of the electronic system. Britain's Jack Draper reckoned it's not 100% accurate, while Emma Raducanu believed wrong calls were made in her loss to Aryna Sabalenka.
'No, I don't,' Raducanu said when asked if she trusted the system. 'I think the other players would say the same thing. There were some pretty dodgy ones, but what can you do?'
The players could do something earlier. After Hawk-Eye's introduction to tennis in 2007, players could challenge calls. Apart from that process also adding to the drama, it effectively blended the best of both worlds while also giving weightage to the other humans on court – the players.
With that gone too, even the players are left mechanical in the largely robotic exercise. Fancy another irony in this all? Wimbledon confirmed the electronic system being non-functional was, well, a human error.