The Ashes 2013: Hot Spot inventor concerned about the flaws in the system

Hot Spot – Stealing the show

There is a lot of speculation regarding the usage of Hotspot technology in the ongoing Ashes series in England. It seems that Kevin Pietersen has used the tape on the edges of his bat to cheat the system. As a result, the inventor of Hotspot Warren Brennan has been warned against the players who are trying to cheat the system.

He tweeted to former England captain Michael Vaughan: “Michael, it’s time you investigate why players are using fibreglass tape on the edges of their bats.”

Channel Nine, earlier, reported that Brennan had worries about the flaws in the Hotspot system. The report of Channel Nine: “Brennan feared silicone tape on bats could fool the technology by dulling the Hot Spot and ensuring no mark shows up on the edge even if a batsman has nicked the ball”.

Geoff Allardice, who is the general manager of ICC, had a meeting with England and Australia and has said that Hotspot will continue in the fourth Test at Durham.

Allardice had a meeting with Brennan in Melbourne on August 2, but later he sent an email to Allaridice that he was too concerned about Hotspot. “He followed up with an email to me on Monday suggesting that they’d looked at some clips and that coatings on the bat might have been dulling down the Hot Spot mark,” Allardice said, “and he made us aware of that. On Tuesday, he did some testing and informed us of that. He also advised us that he was intending to make a media statement.

“We talked about the timing of that. It’s his company, his product, he’s free to say whatever he likes in the media. We were expecting to see something either yesterday or today.

“We didn’t really talk about the inference that players were doing it deliberately to try and beat the Hot Spot. I think we did warn him that if he made a statement along those lines, if the inference was that the players were trying to cheat the Hot Spot system he would need some strong evidence to support that. There is no evidence to support that assertion and certainly from the comments of the teams you can see that they don’t believe that that happens.”

Alastair Cook and Michael Clarke have denied the fact that their players did not use the tape to cheat the system. Allardice also confirmed that ICC would not consider in changing playing conditions as the current evidence is not enough for such move.

“I think it’s very early days, in that players have had coatings on bats, and manufacturers’ stickers on bats, and reinforcing tape on bats for forever and a day,” Allardice said. “We listened to Warren’s view and there may be something in it but I’d think we’d want to gain a lot more evidence before we’d look at rule changes or anything like that.

“This was a theory that he put up on Monday this week. He did some tests that he felt supported that theory. We would like to see some more evidence from on the ground with players in action to support that. At this stage we’ve got no intention of changing the rules in the short term.”