Sylvain Wiltord in 2000 and Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain (£12m from Southampton) in 2011.

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... Yeezy Sale . - Connor McDavid scored 53 seconds into overtime as the Erie Otters came from behind to defeat the visiting Guelph Storm 4-3 on Saturday in Ontario Hockey League action. Fake Yeezy .Y. -- Jayna Hefford scored the winning goal Friday as Canada survived a scare with a 4-3 win over Sweden at the Four Nations womens hockey tournament. https://www.fakeyeezywholesaleonline.com/ . PETERSBURG, Fla. Cyber Monday Yeezy . Cuban testified Thursday that he was upset when the companys CEO told him news that would reduce the value of his shares, for which hed paid $7.5 million. But he said he did nothing improper when he sold those shares over the next two days. Wholesale Yeezy . - The Oakland Raiders re-signed offensive lineman Khalif Barnes on Friday.Granit Xhaka has become Arsenals third most expensive signing after joining from Borussia Monchengladbach. While the transfer fee has been undisclosed, Sky Sports News HQ understands Arsenal are paying in the region of £30m for midfielder Xhaka.After calls to spend, spend, spend over recent seasons, Arsenal look to be treating their supporters to an early summer gift in the form of the 23-year-old. Alexis Sanchez was signed for around £35m from Barcelona in 2014 A fee of around £30m would be almost double that paid for the current third-highest signing in the clubs history; the £17m, including add-ons, for Jose Antonio Reyes from Sevilla in 2004. Who is Granit Xhaka? We profile Granit Xhaka - the midfielder Arsenal are paying ￡30m for The £41.5m handed to Real Madrid for Mesut Ozil still tops the spending list for Arsenal, with Alexis Sanchez, £35m from Barcelona, in 2014 second.Compared to other clubs, Arsenals signings over £20m have been few and far between. Manchester City have signed 20 players for £20m or more, while Manchester United have signed 13, Chelsea 15 and Liverpool nine. Mesut Ozil was a shock £41.5m signing from Real Madrid in 2013 Arsenals highest transfer fees Mesut Ozil Real Madrid ￡42.5m Alexis Sanchez Barcelona ￡35m Granit Xhaka Borussia Monchengladbach ￡30m Jose Antonio Reyes Sevilla ￡17.4m Andrey Arshavin Zenit ￡16.95m Santi Cazorla Malaga ￡16.dddddddddddd5m Calum Chambers Southampton ￡16m Danny Welbeck Manchester United ￡16m Sylvain Wiltord Bordeaux ￡13m Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain Southampton ￡12m Andrey Arshavin (£16.95m from Zenit), Calum Chambers (£16m from Southampton), Danny Welbeck (£16m from Manchester United) are Arsenals next highest signings, surpassing the £13m paid to Bordeaux for Sylvain Wiltord in 2000 and Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain (£12m from Southampton) in 2011.There have been varying reports on the amount of money Arsenal have to spend this summer, but Wenger warned fans in April that the recruitment process is as not as easy as it sounds. Andrey Arshavins was signed for £16.95m on Deadline Day in January 2009 We have to strengthen our squad but its not obvious to find the players despite the money the English clubs will have, said Wenger.Of course, we will work very hard to do that. We are already working. But we have to find the players and that is not easy. Xhaka has joined the Gunners from Borussia Monchengladbach Arsenal were top of the Premier League at Christmas, but ended up stumbling in late winter and early spring before a late revival saw them finish second. They have failed to pass the round of 16 in the Champions League for the past six seasons, with some fans becoming impatient at Wengers tactics in the transfer market. Sky Sports Audio Listen to the latest Arsenal transfer news, reaction and big-name opinion, with Sky Sports Audio Also See: Xhaka signs for Arsenal Transfer Centre Latest transfer news Transfer betting ' ' '