Australia v India, 2015: Spidercam enhances broadcast, don’t scrap it after minor incident
THE spider camera is changing the way we watch sport around the world, and one bad attempt to make a catch means some want to get rid of it.
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THERE are some who believe that the incident that occurred yesterday only confirms it is time to get rid of spidercam.
Others know it is a conspiracy by the same people so we can all move back to 1958 together and suddenly their black-and-white televisions don’t look so out of date.
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The spider camera is changing the way we watch sport around the world and one bad attempt to make a catch and some want to get rid of it?
The camera has been in Australia four years now, watching over Test cricket and State of Origin and grand finals in the NRL and AFL.
It was pinched from the Super Bowl and FA Cups, where it hovered down low over the Superdome or Wembley and introduced us to a whole new way to watch those games.
In that time no ball has ever hit the camera, as ABC falsely reported it did, or even a wire, as Australian captain Steve Smith seemed to indicate.
There hasn’t been a fielder drop a sitter anywhere in the world without trying to find something to blame.
The sun was in his eyes, a bird flew across his line of sight, someone yelled “lollylegs”.
It started shortly before lunch when Lokesh Rahul top-edged the ball and was gone for all money.
Smith got under it, one of the safest pairs of hands in the game.
Then at the last moment Smith bobbled. Did he lose it in the sun?
He adjusted late but the ball clipped his fingers and hit the ground and Smith chased it, falling down.
“F...... wire,” he said as he looked up.
The bad news for Channel Nine was came on the end of perhaps the most boring morning in the history of world cricket. Certainly modern cricket.
After resuming at 1-71 India took an hour to score 19 runs.
Lokesh Rahul, who batted for much of the day, opened then day with a boundary and snoozed through much of the morning, taking 34 balls before making his second scoring shot.
Smith’s dropped sitter gave everybody something to talk about.
The Australia captain later conceded the ball didn’t hit the wire but that it distracted him. It is not entirely unreasonable.
Part of what separates Steve Smith from the warriors of club cricket is an eye that picks up what the mortals can’t.
And as he appeared to get temporarily sun-blinded as he searched for the ball a brief glimpse of wire might have tricked him.
The problem for Channel Nine is Smith was already sensitive to spidercam.
He complained several times in Adelaide that he could see it while he was batting, even after Nine moved it.
Eventually Nine moved it behind him while he was batting.
After lunch Nine and Cricket Australia put out a joint statement, almost as boring as the morning just witnessed.
“We (CA & Nine) have spoken about the matter involving spidercam and the dropped catch before lunch and it’s clear the ball did not hit the camera or its supporting wires,” it said.
“Captain Steve Smith was distracted by one of the wires in his eye line. Both CA and Nine will continue to work together on the use of spidercam in the broadcast coverage and ...”
Good grief.
How do you get through the rest of that?
Thankfully, the Gods of Journalism smiled warmly and next thing you know David Gyngell, the Channel Nine boss, walked into the press room.
“It’s not exactly as if Steve Smith has had an unlucky summer,” Gyngell said.
“If the camera got in the way that’s disappointing but it provides a view for millions of people to get a bird’s eye view of how great the cricket is. If it’s up to me it’s not going anywhere.”
Eventually Nine parked it up where the planes were operating and, while the cricketers might have been happy with that their paymasters were less so.
Spidercam is there not at Nine’s insistence, it emerges, but at Cricket Australia’s. As part of its contract with Nine CA insists the network must provide spidercam and other cameras, such as the run-out cameras.
In other words, Cricket Australia also understands the new world.
And the also realise that Smith might not like the camera but at some point he and his manager will walk into the office at Cricket Australia and start to talk about how much he is worth to continue playing for Australia, where it will be pointed out that without innovations like spidercam bringing in new viewers he is worth less.
After a poor day in the field maybe the whole blow-up was a symptom of another problem, and not the cause.
After all, Smith dropped another late in the second session, this time at slip.
Couldn’t blame spidercam for that.
Originally published as Australia v India, 2015: Spidercam enhances broadcast, don’t scrap it after minor incident
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