The lobbies are where kabaddi officiating quietly falls apart

Two narrow strips at the edge of the mat produce more contested decisions than anything else in the sport, and the replay rarely settles them.

The lobbies are the two strips down the sides of the mat, out of play until contact happens, live the moment a struggle begins. That single conditional is the most difficult thing an official in this sport has to police, and I do not think the review system has caught up with it.

Here is the trouble. Whether the lobby is in play depends on whether a tackle has actually started, and whether a tackle has started is a judgement about intent and contact made in about a fifth of a second, usually with four bodies overlapping. Get it right and a raider who stepped wide is safe. Get it wrong and he is out, or a defender who followed him is out, and a two point swing has happened on a call that reasonable people watching the same replay will disagree about.

Replay does not fix this the way it fixes a line call in tennis. A line call has a fact underneath it. The ball was in or it was out. A lobby call has a definition underneath it, and definitions do not get sharper when you slow them down. Frame by frame, you can watch a hand brush a jersey and still not know whether that was a tackle beginning or a body drifting past.

So the reviews take long, the crowd gets loud, the graphic goes up, and the outcome depends on which official is in the chair. That is not a scandal. It is a design flaw being papered over with technology.

I would rather the sport committed to a mechanical test. Make the lobby live from the instant the raider crosses the baulk line on his return, regardless of contact. It would be cruder and it would occasionally reward a raider who deserved nothing. It would also be checkable in real time by every player, every coach and every viewer, and that is worth more than a definition that only becomes precise in an argument.

The counterargument is that the current rule protects the raider from being herded sideways by a defence that has no intention of tackling him. Fair. But watch how often a fifty second review ends with a shrug from the commentary box.

A rule you can only enforce with slow motion is a rule the players cannot play to.