BCCI maintains DRS stance

BCCI secretary Anurag Thakur and  IPL Chairman Rajeev Shukla

ESPNCricinfo: BCCI secretary Anurag Thakur has said there is no change in the board’s position on opposing the Decision Review System (DRS).

“BCCI’s (technical committee chairman) Anil Kumble and others had gone to the US to look at the system and see if we can improve it further,” Thakur said. “I think there are areas where we can look at and improve it to the next level. If that is possible, the options are never closed.”

Kumble, head of the ICC cricket committee, and Geoff Allardice, the ICC general manager, recently travelled to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and discussed the scheduled testing of the performance of all technologies being used in cricket with engineers from the Field Intelligence Lab.

The lack of DRS was a major factor during India’s opening Test in Sri Lanka in Galle, with the on-field umpires struggling to judge bat-pad edges on a turning track. Stressing that the India players play a key role in the board’s position on DRS, Thakur said the new BCCI dispensation had decided to stick with the old regime’s stance for now.

“It is not about an individual or an association to be against a system. I think we have to see why we don’t have a 100% system, or we have to make (up) our mind that it is not going to be 100%.

“If you look at the past few months, you will see that we have lost many matches and then we come back and say ‘Oh, we have lost this match, let’s look at the DRS’. I think it is not only when we lose a match (that) we should look at the system but we need to look at the overall feasibility of it, whether it is practical, whether it is close to 100 per cent, whether it will help the decision to be implemented. If that is there, we have never closed our mind to that.”