Last week a series of reports in the Sydney Morning Herald drew a fraction of the attention that their importance deserved. In them, the men behind both Hot Spot and Virtual Eye admitted that the ICC's muddling could not go on much longer before their products were withdrawn from the sport.

Throughout the benign emergence of these tools and their integration into the Umpire Decision Review System, it has rarely been mentioned quite how they came about and who is funding them. What started off as a nifty graphic for television companies to make cricket more viewer-friendly now finds that it has been lumped with the pressure of making decisions on which cricket's biggest games are decided.

"Channel Nine pays us a fee for the graphics they want to use but we're paid nothing by the ICC or Cricket Australia for that data to be used in the DRS. The argument is 'You're there to do the TV anyway so there's no extra cost.' But the reality is quite different," Ian Taylor, the executive producer of New Zealand's Virtual Eye, a rival to Hawk Eye, told the paper.

"We provide graphics for television based on the belief that the game doesn't depend on it and that if there's a mistake made, there's no major consequence. But when they use those graphics for the DRS, the answer could change the result of the Ashes."

The companies behind the technology transforming the way umpiring decisions are made on a cricket field find themselves in an unfair position, where the ICC refuse to pay for the improvement necessary to convince boards such as the BCCI that the products are fit for the purpose.

It's an issue which has become increasingly muddled. India have become the main stumbling block with their insistence that the technology is not good enough, with the result that their stunning victory at Kingsmead was tainted because the UDRS would have overturned important decisions against South Africa had the BCCI not refused to use the system.

The problem essentially started with the introduction of these technologies, which began to show umpiring flaws to the consumer. It was a point of no return, because it doesn't make sense for cricket, through the broadcasters, to present the findings of the technology as fact but not use it to better the game.

What we now need to decide is whether the technology is good enough to base important umpiring calls on. The ICC appear to have ruled in its favour, but either it should be good enough for everyone, or for no-one, and then applied accordingly. Equally, the ICC must take more responsibility - both monetary and otherwise - for the betterment of that technology.

Football has drawn much criticism for its reluctance to use technology but at least it hasn't allowed itself to drift into a grey area where the boundaries between human decision making and technological decision making are blurred. The way things currently stand in Test cricket, records would be asterisked if the footnotes weren't so long.

Alastair Cook c Watson b Siddle 82*

*given out caught behind on 18 but decision overturned by UDRS

Zaheer Khan c de Villiers b Harris 27*

*should have been out lbw on 5 but no UDRS in place

The complications are significant and they are sullying the record books of a great game. Cricket is holding itself back from becoming the best it can be.