Two wrongs make a right? Viewers spot apparent missed deflection, ball-tracking error in Alex Carey lbw review
Alex Carey survived an lbw review in strange circumstances on the second day of the final Ashes Test match at the Kia Oval, with a sequence of apparent DRS errors conspiring to produce what was likely the right result.
England went up in a big appeal after Carey missed a lap sweep against Joe Root, and Ben Stokes opted to review. The TV umpire was faced with several decisions, the first of which was whether Carey had hit the ball.
At first, it appeared as if Nitin Menon would rule that Carey had hit the ball due to a spike on UltraEdge. This was followed by boos from the crowd, and he then took another look and decided that the murmurs on UltraEdge didn’t match up with the ball being next to the bat. However, the ball also appeared to deflect visibly as it passed the bat, something seemingly not considered by the umpire.
Moving on to ball tracking, and there were more oddities to come. Carey was reprieved due to ball having hit him outside the line, and he was also shown to have been hit more than three metres away from the stumps, preventing the decision from being overturned in any case.
This prompted bemused reactions from England, with the three-metre rule usually only applying to a batter who has come down the track, rather than just stretched forward from their crease. “Have you got three-metre legs?” Stokes enquired, while Jonny Bairstow quipped, “Go go gadget legs”.
A closer inspection of ball tracking added more mystery to the process, with the impact point showing Carey having been hit low on his leg, rather than on the knee roll as the initial replays had shown. One theory put forward was that the impact point taken was as the ball hit the bat, even with that missed by the umpire.
Agree with this. Not DRS's finest moment. https://t.co/uThIRylkoR
— Lawrence Booth (@BoothCricket) July 28, 2023
“Not DRS’s finest moment,” was the assessment of Wisden Almanack editor Lawrence Booth.
Most agreed that the right decision had still been reached, even if by the wrong method, and Carey did not last much longer, hitting Root to cover soon after.
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