This leads to many questions: 1) The rules of the game should be uniform to all the playing nations, is it now? Does BCCI have a privilege because it is one of the richest boards of the ICC? 2) If a batsman is out LBW without ball tracking and out LBW with ball tracking will it be considered a same kind of dismissal? Funny as it may sound this is how the future of the game is going to be.
Personally I feel that the rules of the game have to be uniform, just because Tendulkar and Dhoni oppose the use of ball tracking it doesn't mean that the rules must just be changed for India. What the BCCI and ICC have done is exactly opposite to one of the basic tenets of sporting philosophy: Provide a level playing field. The BCCI has bullied their way to this.
So does this mean that BCCI are completely wrong? Is a batsman who has spent 20 years in cricket flawed in his thoughts about ball tracking?? Well to answer these questions let us take a look at the ball tracking technology. First, who provides this technology? HawkEye and BallTrack. Now we all know for sure that with just two providers for the technology the financial angle of using this technology is going to be critical. As it always has been in the case of corporates when technology is proprietary or niche there is always an oligopoly involved, read Pepsi and Coke. The rates of both the soft drinks go up and down together. So, theoretically this solution is not financially stable. ICC cannot make this mandatory on member nations as it cannot guarantee a fixed price and inflation percentages.
The next and the most important thing which most of the experts have missed out here is that there is no standards to evaluate the technology. So we are at the mercy of the technology providers to tell us where the ball is going. Here is an interesting question, suppose in a match both HawkEye and BallTrack are used and HawkEye says that the ball is going to hit middle stump and BallTrack says its going to miss leg stump, whose advice should the third umpire take? This is where the ICC's technical committee should take a stance and define a set of basic standards for ball tracking technology, there should be some baseline established for the techonolgy. The providers should adhere to the given standards and develop technology. Till then as Niranjan Shah put it: "It is one person's imagination Vs the umpire's imagination" I feel he meant judgement.
For me ball tracking should just be used to show the path of the ball from where it pitched and the point of impact on the batsman's pads. The 2.5 meter rule, the predicted path etc. should be removed. Technolgy should be used to aid and assist with judgement not forecast the turn of events for umpires.
