Andy Murray was a victim.
Bianca Andreescu too.
Jiri Lehecka had to play a fifth set and essentially win his third round match twice.
Hawk-Eye Live, an electronic line calling system, could have saved the players their set or even their match, but Wimbledon is not using it to its fullest, preferring a more traditional approach. For the rest of the year, many tournaments on the professional tours rely solely on technology, giving players near certainty whether their ball will go in or out because the computer always makes the call.
But when players come to the All England Club for what is widely regarded as the most important tournament of the year, their fate is largely determined by 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, anyone watching the broadcast sees in real time whether a ball is in or out. The people for whom the information is most important – the players and the chair umpire, who oversees the game – must rely on the linesman.
When the human eye judges services to be running at around 120 mph and forehand rallies going faster than 80 mph, errors are bound to occur.
“If mistakes are made at important moments, then of course you don’t want that as a player,” said Murray, who could have won his second-round match against Stefanos Tsitsipas in the fourth set if computers had crossed the line. to call to action. Murray’s backhand return was called even though replays showed the ball was in. He eventually lost in five sets.
No tennis tournament holds on to its traditions like Wimbledon. Grass court tennis. Matches on Center Court start later than anywhere else, and after those in the Royal Box have had their lunch. No lighting for outdoor tennis. A queue with hours of waiting for last-minute tickets.
Those traditions have no effect on the outcome of point-to-point matches. But keeping line judges on the field, as technology has proven more reliable, has impacted—perhaps even changed—important games seemingly every other day.
To understand why that happens, it’s important to understand how tennis ended up with different tournament judging rules.
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 pretty much every other tennis player). McEnroe’s most infamous meltdown occurred at Wimbledon in 1981, caused by an incorrect line call.
“I would have loved to have had Hawk-Eye,” said Mats Wilander, the seven-time Grand Slam champion and star of the 1980s.
But then tennis started experimenting with the Hawk-Eye Live rating system. Cameras capture the bounce of each ball from multiple angles, and computers analyze the images to show the ball’s trajectory and points of impact with only a microscopic margin for error. Line judges remained as backup, but players were given three chances each set to challenge a line call, and an additional challenge when a set went to a tiebreaker.
That forced players to try to figure out when to risk using a challenge they might need later in the set at a crucial point.
“It’s too much,” said Wilander. “I can’t imagine making that calculation, thinking about whether a shot felt right, how many challenges I have left, what time it is in the set.”
Even Roger Federer, who was good at almost every aspect of tennis, was famously bad at making successful challenges.
Soon tennis officials began to consider an all-electronic line calling system. When the Covid-19 pandemic hit, tournaments looked for ways to limit the number of people on the tennis court.
Craig Tiley, Tennis Australia’s chief executive, said the introduction of electronic calling in 2021 was also part of the Australian Open’s ‘culture of innovation’. Players liked it. Fans too, Tiley said, because games moved faster.
Last year, the US Open switched to fully electronic over-the-line calling. There is an ongoing debate about whether the raised lines on hard courts would prevent the technology from providing the same precision as on grass and hard courts. In the French Open and other clay-court tournaments, the ball leaves a trail that referees often inspect.
In 2022, the men’s ATP Tour featured 21 tournaments with all-electronic line calling, including stops in Indian Wells, California; Miami Gardens, Fla.; Canada; and Washington, D.C. All of those sites also have WTA tournaments for women. Every ATP tournament will use it from 2025.
“The question isn’t whether it’s 100 percent good, but whether it’s better than a human, and it certainly is better than a human,” said Mark Ein, owner of the Citi Open in Washington, D.C.
A spokesperson for the All England Club said on Sunday that Wimbledon has no plans to remove its linesmen.
“After the tournament we look 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. Andreescu, the 2019 US Open champion from Canada, has moved deeper into Grand Slam tournaments after years of injury.
With the end of her match against Tunisia’s Ons Jabeur in sight, Andreescu resisted asking for electronic intervention on a crucial shot called by the linesman. From over the net, Jabeur, who had been close to the ball when it landed, advised Andreescu not to waste any of her three challenges before the set, saying that the ball was indeed out. The game continued, but not before television viewers saw the computerized replay showing the ball landing on the line.
“I trust Us,” Andreescu said after Jabeur came back to beat her in three sets, 3-6, 6-3, 6-4.
Andreescu explained that she was thinking about her previous match, a three-set marathon decided by a tiebreak in the last set, saying she “wasted” several challenges.
To Jabeur, she thought, “I’m going to make it, just in case.”
Bad idea. Jabeur won that game, and the set, and then the match.
On track No. 12, the challenge system caused a different kind of confusion. Lehecka had match point against Tommy Paul when he raised his hand to challenge a call after answering a shot from Paul that landed on the line. His request for a challenge came just as Paul hit the next shot into the net.
The point was replayed. Paul won it, and moments later the set, forcing a deciding set. Lehecka won, but still had to run around for half an hour. Venus Williams lost match point in her first round match on another complicated sequence with a challenge.
Leylah Fernandez, a two-time Grand Slam finalist from Canada, said she loves the tradition of line judges at Wimbledon as the world gives in to technology.
On the other hand, she added, if “it had cost me a game, it probably would have been a different answer.”
That’s where Murray, the two-time Wimbledon champion, found himself after his loss Friday afternoon. By the time he got to his press conference, he had learned that his slow and sharply angled backhand return from service that landed just a few yards from the umpire had hit the line.
The point would have given him two chances to break Tsitsipas’ serve and serve out the match. When told the shot was in, his eyes opened in shock and then fell to the floor.
Murray now knew what everyone had seen.
The ball had landed under the nose of the umpire, who confirmed the call, Murray said. He couldn’t imagine how anyone could have missed it. He actually likes having the line judges, he added. Maybe it was his fault he didn’t use a challenge.
“In the end,” he said, “the referee made a bad decision right in front of her.”