The legendary Sachin Tendulkar has defended India's refusal to use the Decision Review System (DRS) during an upcoming tour of England, saying it needed to be more consistent.
"I'm not against the DRS, but I feel it will be more effective with the support of the Snickometre and Hot Spot technology. This will give more consistent results," Tendulkar was quoted as saying by the cricinfo website.
DRS, which allows teams to challenge the umpire's on-field decisions, has been accepted by most of cricket's leading nations and was in use at the recent World Cup, which was co-hosted and won by India.
India, however, have been against the system from the time it was used on a trial basis in their series against Sri Lanka in 2008.
The International Cricket Council (ICC) recently called for DRS to be used across all formats but India have maintained their stance, refusing to accept it for their tour of England starting next month.
Tendulkar's apprehensions over the accuracy of the technology has been widely perceived as one of the reasons for the Indian board's opposition.
Hot Spot is an infra-red imaging system used to determine whether the ball has struck the batsman's bat or pad, while the audio Snickometer is used as a guide to whether the ball touched the bat on its way to the wicket-keeper.
But the latter has not caught on with cricket authorities due to the time it takes to produce an accurate finding.
Tendulkar's statements follows that of newly-appointed South Africa coach Gary Kirsten who backed use of the DRS.
Kirsten, who coached India to their World Cup triumph this year before being appointed by his home country, said, "I'm very much in favour of it, I think it's a great system," he said. "It's increased the consistency of umpiring so I'm a fan of it but I know there are some negative views of it within India."
The former South Africa opener did, however, think the technology could be adapted to prevent teams from using the DRS break for strategising.
Published in The Express Tribune, June 18th, 2011.
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