The Rhythm Between Points: When Machines Replace Voices

I stood in the corridor behind the main court, holding a coffee that had long gone cold, my eyes fixed on the spot along the sideline where the line judge's chair had stood the previous season. This season, the spot was empty. No chair. No person. No voice. At sixty-three, I have watched so many things disappear from tennis that surprise no longer comes easily. But one thing vanished without anyone on the organising committee bothering to mention it at the press conference: the pause before every decision. The pause in which a human being has to breathe in, weigh the moment, and only then call out.

I have sat courtside long enough to know that a ball called out by a human mouth and a ball called out by a machine are two different experiences in terms of rhythm. People watch the match; I watch the breathing of the match. And that breathing has just changed. Not in the scoreline, not in the serve speed, but in the most fragile place of all — the place where the stands and the players breathe together, the instant before a call rings out.

On a summer evening at Wimbledon not long ago, I sat in the eleventh row. Next to me was a grey-haired man in a blue woollen sweater, clutching a programme that had been folded too many times. He turned to me when a shot from the Spanish player sailed close to the line: "Ma'am, was it in or out?" I could not answer. Years ago, I could have. Years ago, someone on the sideline would have answered for all of us. Now a line of text appears on the big screen, and the call comes out of the loudspeaker — flat, emotionless, without hesitation. The stands go quiet. Then the stands applaud. But the applause is cold.

The debate about technology in sport has never been only a debate about accuracy. It has always been a debate about who is allowed to keep the rhythm of the match.

That is why I sat down to write this piece — not to oppose machines, but to record something the spreadsheets cannot measure.

In forty-seven years in this trade, I learned one thing from the old masters: to understand a match, you must first understand the frame in which it unfolds. Professional tennis, over the past two decades, has undergone a quiet revolution in exactly that frame. The revolution began with technology but ended with people.

Hawk-Eye first appeared at professional events in the 2000s, initially as a broadcast analysis tool — trajectories were redrawn for viewers. By 2026 the system was being used in live competition at some major events, allowing players to challenge officials' calls. Each player was given a limited number of challenges, and if a challenge was correct, the player kept it. At first everyone thought it was a charming feature. No one imagined it would slowly erode the line judge's position.

Then in 2026, at the US Open, a Grand Slam experimented for the first time with fully machine-called lines, without line judges on most courts. In 2026, Australia followed, turning the Australian Open into the first major to adopt automated line calling systematically. The pandemic was a convenient excuse — fewer people on court meant lower infection risk. But when the stands filled again, the excuse vanished and the technology stayed. By the 2026 season, both major professional tours had moved to automated line calling at most of their events. And at the most prestigious grass-court tournament, for the first time in nearly a century and a half of existence, the line judges' chairs were removed from Centre Court.

I watched that process unfold season by season, and what I registered was not the rightness or wrongness of the technology. It was the removal of people from a position they had held for an entire working life. For decades, line judging was the job of people who stood at the edge of the light. They did not make the papers. They did not sign endorsement deals. They stood there under the summer sun, bending toward every ball, holding a posture that over the years would curve their backs. Many of them were former players who never made the front line, or people who came to the sport through officiating — a slower path than the player's, but a longer one. They were women and men in middle age, an age at which, once pushed to the margin, it is not easy to step back in.

I am not telling this story to move you and then leave you there. I am telling it because it belongs to what comes next in today's analysis.

To understand what changed in the rhythm of the match, start with a number. When Hawk-Eye was first adopted, a small study in analytical circles estimated that in a five-set match there might be dozens of line calls at the threshold close to the line — balls the naked eye struggles to judge absolutely. Professional line judges have very high accuracy, often recorded above 95 per cent, even above 98 per cent among veterans. But the remaining one or two per cent, across hundreds of balls, is where challenges happen. And it is also where the match has what I call "the contested interval" — the interval in which the player turns, the stands hold their breath, and one human being must answer in front of everyone.

The speed of elite tennis makes this easy to underestimate from the outside. A serve at two hundred kilometres per hour crosses the court in about four to five tenths of a second. The line is a few centimetres wide. A line judge must judge with the eye, subject to the delay neuroscientists call "decision reaction time" — the gap between the brain receiving the signal and acting on it. In a healthy adult that gap is around two hundred milliseconds for a simple reflex, and far longer when judgement is involved. In that gap, the match is held back. Not stopped, but held back like a river blocked for a single instant. That instant is what makes tennis's rhythm.

When machines replace people, that gap nearly disappears. An automated line-calling system detects the bounce, calculates across multiple cameras, and signals within a few tenths of a second. The player has no time to turn and look at anyone. The stands have no time to hold their breath. And that rhythm of "collective reflex" — the thing I have spent nearly half a century observing — is compressed into an animation on a screen.

An analytics technician I have known for years, working inside one event's technology team, measured the time between points at events with line judges and those without. He told me that in some matches, the total playing time shrank by tens of seconds to a few minutes, depending on the number of disputes. A small number. But the rhythm of a sport is not measured by total time. It is measured by how that time is distributed.

Think about the rest between two serves. In professional tennis, each player has about twenty seconds between points, and a serve clock has been in place for several years now. Before the serve clock arrived, a top-level player could use their own sense of timing to stretch or shorten the rest. Some walked the baseline. Some wiped their face with a towel. Some turned their eyes to the stands as if to connect with the crowd. Behind the stands, a stats technician recorded every pause, every habit. That is how data teams track an opponent's rhythm. I have sat beside people doing this work. They are like the clerks of rhythm.

Tennis rhythm used to be kept by three layers of people. The first was the player — the keeper of their own rhythm. The second was the official, the keeper of the match's shared rhythm, ensuring everything happened by the rules. The third was the stands, the resonator of the court. These three layers interwove. When the middle layer is replaced by a machine, the layers above and below must adjust. The player must learn to keep their own rhythm. The stands must learn to read the rhythm alone. And this is where I see something strange happening.

The Moscow door opened for me in 2026, when I stood at fifty-five on a quarter-final night in a mixed zone blocked by a system failure. But the person who opened that door was not the organiser — it was a group of Croatian supporters. That night I understood something I have carried for seven years since: fans are never merely spectators; they are part of the structure that keeps the sport's rhythm. When the stands lose the voice of a line judge, they lose something too. Not the right to watch, but the right to understand. A line of text on a screen says something more precisely than a human call, but it does not say "we all saw the same thing." It only says "this is the result."

That is why I write: in sport, transparency is not measured by the accuracy of the result, but by the degree to which everyone present feels included.

When I wrote about referees and VAR in football years ago, I received plenty of disagreement. But what I always stressed was this: it is not the adoption of technology that destroys transparency — it is the adoption of technology without simultaneously building a mechanism for on-site explanation. A correct decision that no one understands why is worse than an incorrect decision everyone understands why. This is a truth anyone who has observed sport for a long time feels. And it is happening in tennis, under a different form.

In tennis, the automated line-calling system solves the problem of the result but not the problem of participation. Players no longer argue with line judges. That is good for playing time. But it also erases a ritual of the sport — a ritual in which a human being places their credibility on the line in front of the stands. I have watched line judges booed by crowds all match long over a single close call. And I have watched them stand firm, keep working, until the match ended. That is a form of courage no machine possesses.

Now, when the court is empty, I hear the match more clearly. Without the human call, I hear the ball bounce, shoes on the surface, the player's breathing in long rallies. That silence is not bad. It is only different. And that difference forces an observer like me to change ears, to relearn how to read rhythm from other sources. When something disappears, what surrounds it becomes clearer. That is both a loss and an opportunity.

Let me talk about the opportunity.

As a training-ground observer, I have an advantage reporters in the media section do not: I am allowed to watch closed sessions, where there are no crowds, no big screens, no automated line-calling system. There, players practise with each other, and calls are made by mouth — by themselves. I once sat for hours watching a young player serve into the left service box. He called his own balls. He decided his own in and out. And in sessions like that, the rhythm of the sport remains intact, because a person is still the one keeping it.

From 2026, when the pandemic closed every training ground, I began a live-streamed series, "Empty Courts, Full Voices." I invited reserve players, logistics staff, elderly supporters to tell their stories. No match was analysed. No shot was measured. There was only the human voice. After the second episode, a twenty-one-year-old player wept on air, afraid his career would dissolve in silence. I learned one thing: this sport lives on rhythm, and that rhythm does not come from numbers but from people sitting down together. The average audience per episode ran four times the readership of the articles I once wrote for a major paper. It was an uncomfortable truth for a traditional journalist like me, but I learned from it.

How does that lesson apply to technology in tennis?

It applies here: whenever you replace a person with a system, you must ask whether the system carries the rhythm the person carried. The automated line-calling system carries accuracy. It does not carry the pause. It does not carry hesitation. It does not carry the instant the stands wait through. And those things, to someone who has sat courtside for nearly half a century, are not details. They are what makes a match a match rather than a string of data.

I understand why administrators choose machines. I do not deny the benefits. More consistent decisions. Fewer disputes. Lower staffing costs. Faster matches for television. These reasons have foundations. But the reason no one states is the one I want to name: we are gradually turning tennis into a self-operating sport, where people keep only the role of executors, not the role of witnesses. And a sport with no witnesses inside its structure is a sport that could be replaced by anything else, so long as the score is kept.

This is where I push back against the conventional understanding of technology in sport. People say: technology helps, because it makes results more correct. That is true, but it assumes the only value of the sport lies in the result. If that were the only value, we would not need crowds. We would not need applause. We would not need courts. We would only need an optimised scoreboard. But sport does not exist to produce results. It exists to produce a collective experience — and that experience is made by people taking part together in a shared rhythm.

I once argued this point with a male editor when I wrote about tactics. He accused me of not understanding tactical feel. I did not argue back. I went home, opened the responses, read every line carefully, and noted what made sense. Then I returned with a piece carrying specific data in every story, alongside quotes from the fans themselves as an official source. Since then, every piece I write has two layers: training-ground facts and community voices. That is how I defend my position without shouting.

This piece is the same. I do not intend to conclude that technology is bad. I only want to conclude that the price of technology in tennis has been paid with something decision-makers cannot see, because they have not sat long enough in the place where rhythm is kept.

I am old now, but the pulse of the ball is never old.

There is one thing I learned at sixty-three that I wish I had understood twenty years earlier: once you have spent enough time observing something, you begin to see what is not in the spreadsheet. I used to watch a match and look at the score. Then I looked at tactics. Then I looked at how players moved. Now I look at the pauses. The pause before a serve. The pause after a long rally. The pause when the stands wait for a decision. That pause is what technology cannot create and cannot replace. It belongs to people, and it is what makes memory.

Think of the match you remember most. Do you remember the score? Perhaps. Do you remember who won? Certainly. But do you remember the feeling when the whole stadium held its breath for a moment? That is what you remember more than anything. And that moment, in tennis, usually happens where a human being must decide — a player weighing two options, a line judge waiting for the ball to land, a spectator sitting beside another and gripping their hand. No machine grips a spectator's hand.

I do not oppose using technology to make the sport more correct. I oppose using technology as an excuse not to care about people. And what worries me most is not the loss of the line judges' chairs. It is the loss of the habit of valuing human presence inside the structure of the sport. When that habit disappears, everything follows. Broadcasters will replace commentators with automated systems. Courts will replace scorekeepers with sensors. Stands will replace fans with recommendation algorithms. And in the end we will have a perfect sport — so perfect that no one wants to sit and watch it.

At my age, I no longer have time to change everything. But I still have time to record what is changing. That is my job, and I do it with the seriousness of someone who has sat courtside long enough to know that the rhythm of this sport is kept not by the rulebook, but by people willing to hold their breath together.

Observation is not standing outside; it is standing in the right place.

I have been in the right place for many years. And that place, this season, has a new emptiness. A chair has vanished from the sideline. But in the memory of someone who has stood by the court since 2026, that chair is still there. And the "OUT" from the woman named Margaret I mentioned at the start still rings out, clear and on time, as if she had never left the court.

Leaving Wimbledon this year, I walked the path behind the main court where officials and staff usually wait. Fewer people than before. A few technicians were repairing a camera. They did not look at me. I did not disturb them. I just stood there a few minutes, looking at the London sky, grey as every season, and thought of all the people who had once stood in exactly this spot, doing exactly this job, for decades. None of them will be written into any hall of fame. But if this sport keeps any of the rhythm I love, it is thanks to people like them — the keepers of rhythm whose names no one remembers.

When I hold the microphone in front of me with an empty court, I have never spoken to so many people. That is the miracle of this craft: the closer you stand, the more you hear; the longer you stay, the less you understand about great things, but the more you understand about small ones. And those small things, in tennis, are the whole sport.

Looking ahead, I do not know what next season will bring. Perhaps more courts without line judges. Perhaps more analytical algorithms. Perhaps systems I have never seen. But I believe one thing: whatever replaces people in this sport must eventually answer a question only the stands can ask — the question I have heard for decades, from the mouths of those sitting beside me, from the grey-haired man this summer, from the Croatian supporters in Moscow, from the young player weeping on a live stream: "What is happening, and am I part of it?"

Machines can answer the first question. The second belongs to people. And the rhythm of tennis, if it survives, will be kept by those who can answer both. That is what I will keep watching — not on camera, but in the stands, on the bench, in the corridor behind the court, where real people meet. In the right place, where an observer must stand.

The call will change. But the rhythm remains.