Andy Murray is a victim.
Also Bianca Andreescu.
Jiri Lehecka had to play a fifth set and essentially won his third-round match twice.
Hawk-Eye Live, an electronic line calling system, can save players from their set, even their match, but Wimbledon doesn’t use it in its entirety, preferring a more traditional approach. The rest of the year on the professional tours, many tournaments rely exclusively on technology, which allows players to know with certainty whether their ball is going in or out because the computer always makes the call.
But when the players take to the All England Club for what is widely regarded as the most important tournament of the year, their fates are largely determined by the line judges who rely on their eyesight. Even more frustrating, because Wimbledon and its television partners have access to the technology, which players can use to challenge a limited number of calls per match, everyone watching the broadcast can see in real time whether a ball is in or out. The people for whom the information is most important — the players and the chair manager, who oversees the match — must rely on the line judge.
When the human eye judges travels about 120 mph and forehand rallies faster than 80 mph, errors are bound to happen.
“When mistakes are made at important moments, then, as a player you don’t like that,” said Murray, who would have won his second round match against Stefanos Tsitsipas in the fourth set, had the computers will make line calls. Murray’s backhand return was called, though replays showed the ball was in. He lost in five sets.
No tennis tournament clings to its traditions like Wimbledon does. Grass court tennis. Center Court matches start later than everywhere else, and those in the Royal Box after lunch. No lights for outdoor tennis. A queue with an hour wait for last minute tickets.
Those traditions have no effect on the outcome of battles from one point to the next. But keeping judges in line on the court, after technology has proven more reliable, is affecting — perhaps even turning — major matches seemingly every other day.
To understand why that happens, it’s important to understand how tennis came to have different rules for judging its tournaments.
Before the early 2000s, tennis – like baseball, basketball, hockey and other sports – relied on human officials to make calls, many of which were wrong, according to John McEnroe (and almost everyone else tennis player). McEnroe’s most terrifying meltdown happened at Wimbledon in 1981, prompted by a wrong line call.
“I want to have Hawk-Eye,” said Mats Wilander, the seven-time Grand Slam singles champion and a star of the 1980s.
But then tennis began experimenting with the Hawk-Eye Live judging system. Cameras capture the bounce of each ball from multiple angles and computers analyze the images to depict the ball’s trajectory and impact points with only a microscopic margin for error. Line judges remained as a backup, but players received three opportunities per set to challenge a line call, and an additional challenge when a set went to a tiebreaker.
This forced players to try to figure out when to risk using a challenge that they might need at a more important point in the next set.
“It’s too much,” said Wilander. “I can’t imagine doing that calculation, standing there, wondering if a shot went well, how many challenges I have left, how much time on set.”
Even Roger Federer, good at almost every aspect of tennis, is notoriously terrible at making successful challenges.
Soon after, tennis officials began to consider a fully electronic line calling system. When the Covid-19 pandemic hit, tournaments were looking for ways to limit the number of people on the tennis court.
Craig Tiley, the chief executive of Tennis Australia, said the use of electronic calling in 2021 was also part of the Australian Open’s “culture of change”. The players loved it. So do the fans, Tiley said, because the matches move faster.
Last year, the US Open switched to fully electronic line calling. There is an ongoing debate about whether the raised lines on clay courts will prevent the technology from providing the same accuracy as on grass and hardcourts. In the French Open and other clay court tournaments, the ball leaves a mark that is often inspected by the umpires.
In 2022, the men’s ATP Tour featured 21 tournaments with fully electronic line calling, including stops in Indian Wells, Calif.; Miami Gardens, Fla.; Canada; and Washington, DC All of those sites have women’s WTA tournaments as well. It will be used by every ATP tournament starting in 2025.
“The question is not if it’s 100 percent right but if it’s better than someone, and it’s definitely better than someone,” said Mark Ein, who owns the Citi Open in Washington. , DC
An All England Club spokesman said on Sunday that Wimbledon had no plans to sack its line judges.
“After the tournament we are looking at everything we do, but at the moment, we have no plans to change the system,” said Dominic Foster.
On Saturday, Andreescu fell victim to human error. The 2019 US Open champion from Canada, Andreescu is going deeper into Grand Slam tournaments after years of injury.
Seeing the end of his match against Ons Jabeur of Tunisia, Andreescu refused to seek electronic intervention on a crucial shot called by the line judge. From across the net, Jabeur, who was close to the ball as it landed, advised Andreescu not to waste one of his three challenges for the set, saying the ball was already out. The match continued, although not before television viewers saw a computerized replay showing the ball landing on the line.
“I trust Ons,” said Andreescu after Jabeur came back to defeat him in three sets, 3-6, 6-3, 6-4.
Andreescu explained that he was thinking about his previous match, a three-set marathon decided by a final-set tiebreaker, where he said he “wasted” some challenges.
Against Jabeur, he thought, “I’ll save it, just in case.”
Bad idea. Jabeur won that game, and the set, and then the match.
In Court No. 12, the challenge system causes another kind of confusion. Lehecka had a match point against Tommy Paul when he raised his hand to challenge a call after returning a shot from Paul that landed on the line. His request for a challenge came when Paul hit the next shot into the net.
The point is replayed. Paul wins it, and then the set moment, forcing a deciding set. Lehecka won, but had to run for half an hour. Venus Williams lost on match point in her first-round match in another complicated sequence involving a challenge.
Leylah Fernandez, a two-time Grand Slam finalist from Canada, said she likes the tradition of line judges at Wimbledon as the world increasingly succumbs to technology.
Then again, he added, if “it costs me a match, maybe it’s a different answer.”
That’s where Murray, the two-time Wimbledon champion, found himself after his loss on Friday afternoon. By the time he arrived at his news conference, he learned that his slow, sharply angled backhand return serve that landed just a few yards from the umpire had clipped the line.
The point would give him two chances to break Tsitsipas’ serve and serve out the match. When he was told the shot was in, his eyes widened with surprise, then fell to the floor.
Murray now knows what everyone else has seen.
The ball landed under the umpire’s nose, which confirmed the call, Murray said. He couldn’t imagine how anyone had missed it. He actually likes having the line judges, he added. Maybe it was his fault for not using the challenge.
“In the end,” he said, “the umpire made a poor call that was right in front of him.”
