Wimbledon was forced to explain yet another issue with the live electronic line-calling system on Tuesday after it malfunctioned again, only a day after it had expressed confidence that the problems that led to an embarrassing error on Sunday had been fixed.
The latest incident occurred in the quarter-final between Taylor Fritz and Karen Khachanov. Serving at 0-15 in the opening game of the fourth set, Fritz missed his first serve, which was correctly called out. He then landed his second serve but when he hit his next forehand, which landed around four feet in, the automated system called “fault”, thinking it was a serve.
The second serve had not been registered by the speed gun and the umpire, Louise Azemar-Engzell, was quickly on the phone to the control room. “Ladies and gentleman, we will be replaying the last point due to a malfunction. The system is now working,” she said, to a smattering of boos from the crowd on No 1 Court.
A Wimbledon spokesperson said the mistake had occurred because the ballboy was still on court when Fritz started his serve. “The player’s service motion began while the [boy] was still crossing the net and therefore the system didn’t recognise the start of the point. As such the chair umpire instructed the point be replayed.”
Wimbledon replaced line judges with automated live-calling this year and the incident on Tuesday is the latest in a string of issues, which peaked on Sunday when the system failed to call a backhand by Britain’s Sonay Kartal that landed clearly long, which should have given Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova a 5-4 lead in the first set. At the time, the Russian accused the tournament of home bias but her anger abated as she went on to win the match.
Tournament organisers said the technology had been turned off by mistake on that section of the court. Subsequently they “removed the ability for Hawk-Eye operators to manually deactivate the ball tracking”.
Khachanov said afterwards that he preferred having human line judges. “[The question] is why this is happening,” he said. “Is it just like error of the machine or what’s the reason? Sometimes it’s scary to let machine do what they want.”
Fritz, however, preferred the automated system. “In that situation it helped me because I got a first serve out of it,” he said. “There’s going to be some issues here and there. To be honest, I still think it’s much better to just have the electronic line calling as opposed to the umpires because I do like not having to think about challenging calls in the middle of points. I think it’s a better system.”
