On BBC Radio 4’s Today Programme this morning, Nick Robinson announced that the line judges at Wimbledon have all been made redundant, to be replaced by machines. With less than ten minutes yet to run, as I write, before Wimbledon starts, I will stick my neck out and predict that this will not go well. I presume that the men in blazers at the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club have concluded that machines perform the task of line judging more accurately and reliably than do we fallible human beings. But I bet there will be glitches, followed by ructions. One can point out to a machine, just as to a person, that chalk flew up, and that therefore the machine cannot be taken seriously. There will be no recourse to Hawk-Eye, because the whole court of arbitration has essentially been taken over by a kind of Cyclops, a Super-Hawk-Eye. Presumably, in the event of a dispute, overtures will be made to the umpire, seated at the net in the lofty chair; but has it not become inevitable, given our current love affair with Artificial Intelligence, that the umpire itself will become a robot?
If the aggrieved player insists on picking a fight with the umpire, there remains a final arbitrator and conciliator, a kind of Supreme Court of the Court – the referee. The referee has traditionally been virtually invisible, only making occasional visits to the court, usually to have a chin wag with the umpire, to talk about the weather. By a logical extension, the referee too will be a robot, trundling across the grass, like one of these automatic lawn mowers, down to the net.
This is not going to make good television, robots discussing whether or not the ball just nicked the line. Look at these VAR replays in football and rugby union. They get played and replayed and viewed from a variety of angles, and still the ref cannot make up his mind. I suppose the robots will agonise less, because at heart they don’t really care, just as the algorithms assigning school pupils grades during the pandemic didn’t care, not to mention the Horizon computer system with respect to sub-postmasters and mistresses. We seem to have an absurdly blind faith in the reliability of our technology, despite the fact that our computers keep crashing, our driverless cars will insist on turning right when we ask them to turn left, and our latest space rocket suffers a “rapid unscheduled disassembly” shortly after take-off.
Then there’s the possibility of a cyber-attack. What better target, for those wishing to mock, ridicule, and ultimately damage British prestige, than the Jewel in the Crown that is Wimbledon? The hackers might just be teenage nerds out for a laugh; or they might be ransom malware people out for profit; or they might be foreign antagonists out to cripple our so-called “soft power”. Errant calls could be so fantastical as to move from the absurd to the surreal; not just line calls, but “let” calls, foot faults, and code violations. Racquets will be smashed in frustration. When it starts raining, the Centre Court roof will jam. Then the hackers’ attention will shift from the courts to Henman Hill, or Murray Mound, or Raducanu Redoubt – whatever it is now called. The Pimm’s Number One will be spiked, and the strawberries and cream addled. Ken McCallum and Blaise Metreweli (five and six, respectively), had better get on to it.
But what on earth is the point of it all? It’s only two or four guys, or gals, or both, knocking a ball across a net. It’s just a game. You may jalouse that I haven’t had a game of tennis since – as it so happens – 1987. I’m as likely to go to Wimbledon as to Glastonbury. I’m not knocking it. Some dear friends of mine are avid enthusiasts and are in SW19 even as I write. But it does seem to me, not unlike Glastonbury, to have become somewhat overblown. The great and the good like to be seen in the Royal Box, just as they like to trudge around Worthy Farm, in green designer wellies, in the mud. That which was once edgy, is now Establishment. Glastonbury is also in the news this morning because somebody said something intemperate about the Israeli Defence Force. I thought it was Bob Dylan, but it turns out it was Bob Vylan. Shows you what I know. I advanced the opinion in my local shop this morning that they actually said, “Deaf to the IDF”. That’s how they talk down there, you know, today’s yoof. But I was shot down in flames. The Government seems to be highly critical of the BBC for broadcasting the group’s set live. But then, the Government have always got it in for the BBC. They always want to keep them in a cowed state. Whether or not another controversial group, Kneecap, are glad that attention has been diverted from them, I couldn’t say.
But, you may jalouse again, I’m not that exercised. I don’t care for rap. That’s just my personal view. I shouldn’t knock it. I know for many it is culturally important, and I dare say you could argue that rap is a form of recitative. I wish rap fans all the luck in the world. But it’s not my cuppa tea. It’s even worse than Punk.
God Save the Queen.
jamescalumcampbell 