A little less than a decade ago, a Test match between Australia and the West Indies at Queen’s Park Oval in Trinidad was delayed for 20 minutes in bright sunshine because a power outage meant that it could not be broadcast.
While things have not been quite as extreme as that at the Gabba, there has been a constant tension between the expectations of cricket’s oldest and most lavishly broadcast contest and the realities of Australia’s COVID-19 border wars.
Put another way: if Real-time Snicko isn’t there to hear it, does Josh Hazlewood actually catch the edge?
Realtime Snicko has become a well-known component of Test match decision-making.Credit: Twitter
The moment in which Dawid Malan wafted uncertainly at Hazlewood, the ball passed perilously close to the bottom of the bat, and the Australians appealed with rather more urgency than optimism, summed up the conflict. Malan’s subsequent courageous partnership with Joe Root, pulling England back into the game, only added to its intrigue.
Ever since the 2013-14 Ashes series, Real-time Snicko - or RTS - has been part of the suite of technical aids available to the umpires to decide whether a noise has come from bat, pad or elsewhere.
Of the players contesting the Gabba Test, fewer than half - Australia’s captain Pat Cummins, Nathan Lyon, David Warner, Steve Smith and Mitchell Starc, and England’s captain Root and Chris Woakes - have played Test cricket for long enough to know what that’s like.
Another squad member, Usman Khawaja, was victim of a “howler” during the preceding Ashes series in England when RTS showed he had got nowhere near a Graeme Swann off-break at Old Trafford. When the technology was added, Root was given out caught behind off the bowling of Shane Watson on RTS evidence alone.
This is all to say that players on both sides of an Ashes battle, and match officials caught in between them, have become conditioned to certain things, and certain aids to a decision.
That was very clear from the miffed responses of Hazlewood, Cummins, Smith and others when no clear verdict could be given for the Malan referral. A skerrick of a white dot could, perhaps, be seen on HotSpot, the infra-red camera device that had been considered a cure-all before RTS was introduced. But without backup clarification, the third umpire Paul Wilson was unmoved.
And as much as players, officials, spectators and television viewers have become used to playing Ashes cricket with no technical stone unturned, these additions to broadcasts and umpiring decisions do not come easy. Especially when Australia’s state governments are exerting their sovereignty to degrees not seen since federation.
Fox Cricket, the host broadcaster of men’s international matches in Australia, would typically have a production and technical crew of about 100 operators at the Gabba. But for this match, the group has been shaved down to 30, many of them operating under the strictest quarantine conditions.
Specialist operators of technology like ball-tracking and RTS have been restricted to moving only between their accommodation and the Gabba itself. These conditions were flagged as a possible problem area some months before the coin toss, but Brisbane was never likely to lose the game.
So when issues arose in the syncing between the pictures and the audio from the stump microphones - the two components used to build the RTS images - there was no option to seek help from outside this tight bubble. RTS should be back in time for the second Test in Adelaide.
The same was true of the third-party technology used to tell the third umpire Wilson and his technical assistant that a no-ball has been bowled, in a manner not a million miles removed from Monty Python’s machine “that goes bing”.
Unable to get it working, the officials informed the teams that no-balls would only be checked in the event of a wicket, much to Ben Stokes’ chagrin. Here, again, was something that takes more than one bit of adjustment.
But the rush of information and comprehension required at the start of a Test series, particularly one taking place amid so many additional COVID protocols and fewer technical operators than usual, has taken its toll in a few ways this week: just look at Rory Burns’ feet.
Nick Hockley, the Cricket Australia chief executive, termed the scale of an Ashes Test as follows when he explained why Western Australia and its hard border had lost the fifth Test: “In the end, delivering a Test match is a massive logistical endeavour, a major event, five days, a huge number of production personnel.”
Imagine, then, a 20-minute delay in bright sunshine as happened back in Trinidad due to a power outage, and the sort of storm it would have caused in the middle of an Ashes Test in Brisbane. For the vast behind-the-scenes crew who now deal in Australia versus England contests, this has been an exercise in doing their best in difficult circumstances.
To quote True Blue, the John Williamson drawl so beloved of Steve Waugh and Justin Langer: Will you tie it up with wire, Just to keep the show on the road ...
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