When Russian tennis player Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova aired her frustrations during last Sunday’s fourth-round match at Wimbledon against Britain’s Sonay Kartal, she had good cause to do so.
The new electronic line-calling system had failed to flag a shot from the British player as out. It was the third call that had been missed by the state-of-the-art system. One could be excused as a glitch, but two was inexcusable. And a third? Something was clearly wrong.
The umpire stepped in on the first two. On the third, they stood the system down.
In the end, the cause of the problem wasn’t a technical failure of the system. There were no bugs in the software or flaws that were exploited. Instead, it came down to human error. An operator had mistakenly turned off the cameras monitoring one section of the court, meaning that for six minutes and 49 seconds, the automated calling system effectively had a blind spot.
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That must have been an awkward conversation at the team meeting.
The system was quickly altered to ensure the cameras could not be manually deactivated by operators, hopefully preventing the same situation from occurring.
That wasn’t the end of the Wimbledon tech woes though. In the men’s quarter-final between Taylor Fritz and Karen Khachanov on Tuesday, the system incorrectly identified a shot as a serve and called a fault.
Again, human action exposed the limitations of the system. This time, the system became confused by Fritz preparing his serve while the ballboy was still crossing the net. But the (human) umpire stepped in and the point was replayed.
Other complaints about the system at the tournament range from inaccurate decisions to calls being too quiet for players and spectators to hear.
This is the first year Wimbledon has used an all-electronic line-calling system, replacing the 300 line judges that used to make the calls with help from the Hawk-Eye system.
Overall, it hasn’t been a good debut.
You might argue that the decision to replace the human officials with technology was a mistake when the stakes are so high. But Wimbledon isn’t the first tennis tournament to do it, with the Australian Open using the system for the past few years. All ATP (Association of Tennis Professionals) tournaments will have the system up and running this year.
It has divided the players too. While some players hate it – Emma Raducanu called it “dodgy” – others prefer not to think about challenging calls mid-match.
Wimbledon has served up a real-time view of how technology can drastically reduce the need for human expertise – and why it isn’t always a good idea.
But this isn’t the first time automated systems have let down the very sports that they are meant to protect. When VAR (Video Assistant Referee) was introduced to football, the technology was intended to stop bad calls. In the 2019/20 Premier League season, it failed to spot a goal in the match between Aston Villa and Sheffield United. Not only did the Hawk-Eye technology fail to spot the ball crossing the line, but the VAR did not follow up on it. That match finished 0-0, securing a precious point for Villa that ultimately kept them in the Premier League
A second mistake hit closer to home, at least in this house. In the 2023/24 Premier League season, Liverpool had a Luis Diaz goal ruled out in error, flagged as offside. A VAR check confirmed it was a mistake, but the VAR team failed to communicate that properly to the referee, allowing the game to restart and the error to stand. Spurs went on to win 2-1. You would imagine there was a lot of cursing of VAR that day.
Even closer to home, the GAA has been forced to stand down its Hawk-Eye system on a number of occasions. Two years ago, the system was stood down for the All-Ireland football quarter-final between Monaghan and Armagh after it failed to function properly when a kick was referred to Hawk Eye. It had been a similar story on semi-final weekend the previous year, when a score was challenged and ruled out before the referee added it back in at half time.
The incidents undermined confidence in a technology that had rarely given cause for complaint in a decade of being in use for a decade with few complaints.
It is all about perception though. Never mind that these systems are probably more accurate than human officials ; if you want people to trust in it, the system has to be perceived as flawless.
There is a lesson here. While most of us are looking over our shoulders at AI, fearing it might take our jobs, there are some professions where having a human in the mix will be an advantage. Because it doesn’t matter how cutting edge the technology, it will inevitably be taken down by one factor it can’t control: human error. And, as these errors have shown us, that sometimes creates issues that people - not technology - must resolve.
