During a mixed doubles match at the ongoing Australian Open, the players involved were left well and truly baffled.
Australian pair John-Patrick Smith and Lizette Canbrera took on Rafael Matos and Luisa Stefani when the electronic line call technology made a shocking error on the very first point of the match. After Smith’s first serve landed inside the service box, it was called out by the automated system.
The match had to be stopped for a few minutes while the chair umpire made a call to other officials to rectify the problem with the technology, and were successful in doing so and Smith was able to serve again. The electronic line-calling was introduced for the first time at the Australian Open in 2021.
It replaced the line judges in an effort to reduce the number of staff on-site during the COVID-19 pandemic. The technology works with remote tracking cameras around the court, sending the audio line calls in real time. However, the technology does make the occasional error.
The technology was criticised by Jelena Ostapenko following her victory over Coco Gauff in the fourth round at Melbourne Park. The Latvian ultimately gave a vote of no confidence to former player Laura Robson during her on-court interview. “In the system?” she asked when pressed on whether she had faith in every call. “To be honest, no!”
“Honestly, this live electronic system, I don’t know. Sometimes it feels like it makes some mistakes. Of course, we have to play. Sometimes I look at my team because I know I’m wrong, but I feel like some balls are pretty close, so I want to know what they think about the call.”
The 25-year-old criticised the electronic line calling yet again after losing her quarter-final to Kazakhstan's Elena Rybakina.
"I'm not really happy with the system they are using," she said. "A couple of times it was not even by a couple of centimetres. It was much more than that. But I cannot do anything about it, because it is the way as it is. First of all, [the calls] are really late sometimes. You already hit the ball, and then you hear 'out,' which is normally not the way it is with the line umpires.
“And second of all, some balls were quite, how you say, not a little out. They were [quite] a bit out and they were not called." The number 17 seed called for a return of the Hawk-Eye system and line judges, which has not been in operation at the Grand Slam for two years.
"Honestly, my personal opinion, I wish it would be the Hawk-Eye system and the line umpires, because I feel like that way it's more precise, and much [fewer] mistakes, in my opinion," the 2017 French Open champion added.
"I think also, that way it looks a little better for me on the court how it is. Not just calling-wise, but in general how the court looks, because with no line umpires, for me, it looks a little empty."
