all club debuts.The former Adelaide star racked u

In sport, grey areas are good for the game, or so popular wisdom will tell you. They generate controversy, talking points, the froth and heat of column inches.Football, the worlds most popular sport, is riddled with grey areas. Is the offside player active or passive? Is that handball or ball-to-hand? As for trying to ascertain whether a defender first made contact with ball or man, good luck with that. Even among a punditariat paid to deliver verdicts, and afforded multiple TV replays from innumerable angles and at all speeds to reach them, there is rarely consensus as to the facts of what happened. Ive seen em given.Rugby, with its rucks and mauls, isnt so much a grey area as a black hole, although what it lacks in clarity is mitigated by players acceptance of refereeing decisions.Perhaps its all a test of moral forbearance, ultimately edifying. Yet something implacable in us seeks justice and certainty, and so, in cricket, technology has been embraced to supplement fallible human perception and help clear up grey areas and blind spots.Many of crickets grey areas tend to be matters of ethics - walking and Mankading, for instance - rather than of adjudication, particularly where technology definitively clarifies incidents previously tossed on the pile marked benefit of the doubt to the batsman. But there are also cricketing grey areas that, as well as being matters of ethics, not only elude the capabilities of technology but also the current definitions of the rules.Imagine youre an ant (as a thought experiment, rather than for a John Buchanan-esque team-building exercise). Youre out foraging in the vast forest of Feroz Shah Kotla, and one day decide to clamber the huge swaying green skyscraper plants, whereupon you see the giant, white-clad monsters that ant mythology had told you about. Are you, from this new vantage point, on the ground or not? And how about from the cricketers vantage point?Reductio ad absurdum, perhaps, yet quite often commentators watching the replay of a low catch will observe that grass can be seen through the fielders fingers (commonplace enough on shagpile carpet club outfields). Assuming the technology catches up to the point where all this can be unequivocally verified - perhaps through 3D modelling - if the ball flicks a blade of grass on the way through to the fingers, is it out? Can the ball hit grass without hitting ground? Is the ground a fractal surface?Whether catches have carried has long been an ethical hotspot for cricket. There have been innumerable flashpoints. Just this summer at The Oval, Alex Hales entered the referees room uninvited and mightily aggrieved at being given out caught at midwicket. In 2008, midway through a particularly fractious Border-Gavaskar series, the tentative agreement to accept the fielders word on contentious catches was shelved by the captains, Anil Kumble and Ricky Ponting.Of course, claiming catches that you know have bounced is, obviously, cheating (no ethical grey area here), but it is often extremely difficult to tell, both for the existing technology and for the catcher herself, whose head, due to the hardwired survival instinct, frequently lifts away from the ball, the eyes not watching it all the way into the hands. Mike Brearley once denied debutant offspinner Geoff Cope a Test hat-trick, catching Iqbal Qasim low at slip before, feeling unsure despite the umpires finger being raised and two fielders verifying it had been taken cleanly, recalling the batsman in the best interests of the series.Meanwhile, the nature of images hitherto captured by TV cameras - particularly at low angles, with impinging shadow, foreshortening in magnification and general blurriness - has done little to remove uncertainty. Batsmen have often exploited this (and the benefit-of-the-doubt convention) by standing their ground and waiting for inconclusive replays. This is where the soft signal has been such a success, one of the few ways that statutory support for the on-field decision makes sense (because of the flaws with the technology) and isnt a simple sop to umpires waning symbolic authority.So, after an engagement that had been full of hesitations, India agreeing to the use of DRS for the home series against England seals crickets marriage with technology. Not that there arent other aspects of the game that still elude its implicit drive for absolute certainty.How long before lasers help judge no-balls, even stumpings, perhaps after a powerful zoom shows a millimetre of heel behind a crease line that was painted unevenly (from an ants perspective, if not a humans)? Will umpires eventually wear holographic glasses projecting a batsmans original stance so they can better judge leg-side wides, or whether full tosses are over waist height, as with Chris Woakes reprieve in Dhaka? More prosaically, we have flashing stumps and bails, so what about a flashing boundary marker? Of course, while FIFA eventually acceded to goal-line technology, football cannot adopt blanket technology because so much of it is interpretation. For instance, Law 12 states that a direct free kick is awarded if a player commits the offences of kicking, tripping or striking an opponent (or attempting to do so), or jumping, charging, pushing or tackling them in a manner considered by the referee to be careless, reckless, or using excessive force. Considered by the referee…Cricket is non-contact, and thus doesnt have to interpretatively parse such conflagrations. It is primarily concerned with ballistics, with the black-and-white of line calls, or tracking lines. Yet areas of interpretation that cannot be definitively ascertained by technology remain. Take Bangladeshs final wicket in the Chittagong thriller, as a vicious reverse-swinger crashed into Shafiul Islams pad several inches outside the line, whereupon Kumar Dharmasena adjudged him not to have played a shot and gave him out lbw.Now, as anyone who has faced someone swinging the ball both ways at decent pace will confirm, its perfectly possible that you start out leaving the ball and at some precise point over the course of the next 0.45 seconds - the Oh shit moment - change your mind and decide to play.Imagine a hypothetical techno-utopia in which you could observe this thought process on a real-time MRI scan. Those firing neurons might say: Right, Ive now decided Im going to try and play this ball, but unfortunately my motor system was tardily alerted and the bat will thus arrive on the scene late - unfashionably late, just as the ball crashes into my pad - while the somewhat ostentatious rush to bring it into position can only confirm my guilt in the umpires eyes...Playing a shit shot is not the same as playing no shot, as many batsmen missing googlies by several inches have been at pains to explain, yet the umpire is here reduced to judging intention. And while theres no doubt whatsoever that Shafiuls shot was incompetent, can we say, irrefutably, that he wasnt trying to play a shot? Or, to frame it another way: at what point on a balls trajectory must a batsman be deemed to be attempting to play a shot: at release, upon arrival?Reading the human brain for intent is the greyest of all grey areas, and while well probably never do that beyond all reasonable doubt, there can be little doubt that when Dharmasenas death-dealing finger went up, the Bangladeshis werent thinking, Oh well, at least its a talking point... Ronnie Lott Jersey . "Theyve both been real good," said Babcock. "Havent changed our minds." A decision has seemingly been made - Sundays Group B-deciding tilt against Finland ahead - but it could not have been an easy one. Price opened the tournament with a sturdy 19-save performance against the Norwegians, yielding just one goal. Steve DeBerg Jersey . The Masters champion and winner of last weeks Australian PGA has a three-round total of 14-under 199 at Royal Melbourne. 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The AFLs greatest modern rivalry is back where it matters most, with Geelong playing Hawthorn in the finals.Their previous 19 games makes Friday nights qualifying final at the MCG the most intriguing clash of the weekend.The Cats strong finish to the regular season means they are the slight favourites, but form is irrelevant.The three-time defending premiers are guaranteed to be ready, given it is the finals and the opposition is Geelong.Between them, Hawthorn and Geelong have won seven of the last nine premierships.Their rivalry started when the Hawks upset the Cats to win the 2008 premiership.The loss infuriated Geelong and their players made a private pact never to lose to Hawthorn again.Hawthorn president Jeff Kennett then claimed before their next match at the start of the 2009 season that Geelong lacked his teams mental drive.Geelong won the next 11 matches and the streak became known as the Kennett Curse.It only ended once Kennett had resigned as Hawks president.Hawthorn beat Geelong by five points in the 2013 preliminary final and a week latter, took out the first of their three-straight premierships with the grand final win over Fremantle.ddddddddddddIn 2014-15, the Hawks had built a five-game winning streak over the Cats.But that was snapped in round one this year when Patrick Dangerfield made the mother of all club debuts.The former Adelaide star racked up 43 possessions for Geelong in their 30-point win.Hes a great player but ... theyve got enormous depth through the middle of the ground, said Hawthorn coach Alastair Clarkson.Its no secret that its going to be a key battle for the contest.If we can get enough supply in that part of the ground then we give ourselves a chance.But in the only game weve played this year theyve won that battle and it cost us the game.Hawthorn have regained Ben Stratton and Ben McEvoy, while Geelong recalled Scott Selwood for a likely stopping role on Sam Mitchell.Forecast rain on Friday could also force a late change or two. 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