It’s not quite the Indian Premier League with a little bit of controversy, a couple of calls going here and there, which could really have an oversized role in the result.
On Thursday night, it went all the way down to the last ball, where Lucknow Super Giants took it right down to the wire to produce an unlikely heist against Kolkata Knight Riders.
What happened?
Dynamic Kiwi batter Finn Allen opened for KKR, and looked very good in his short stay. It was his wicket which caused controversy: after the ball hit the slice of his bat, it flew a long way down to Digvesh Rathi at third man.
Digvesh just about kept his footing, and claimed a clean catch to see the end of Allen. LSG were ahead early – but some replay angles showed that it might not have been clean at all.
Why may the 3rd umpire have kept on-field call?
More than anything, fans are disappointed at the refusal of the broadcasters to show a good angle of the replays, with fans having to wait until much later to see that Rathi might have nudged the boundary cushion to make their own call.
But even if the third umpire did take complete time and patience to make the call, would it have mattered much? Usually to overturn on-field calls, the third umpire will need irrefutable, empirical, unavoidable proof from the angles they are provided: only if they have clear evidence that dictates a change in their decision will they recommend a change.
In the past, this used to be defined by the soft signal provided by on-field umpires. Now, in the next iteration of replay and review, all the checks and replays take place rapidly ball-by-ball and behind the scenes.
It’s not that the Rathi catch wouldn’t have been checked by the TV umpire, but simply that the slight movement of the boundary cushion was probably not enough evidence to reverse the on-field call.