Seamless as the event looks, with everyone in their all whites, sipping on a Pimm’s Cup and eating strawberries and cream in the stands, there are indeed mishaps at Wimbledon! It’s inevitable; with such a huge event, 128 tennis players being flown down from all across the globe, and 46 tennis courts to keep an eye on, including the 18 grass courts that are used for the main tournament that have to be keenly watched, monitored, and tended to over the course of the tournament, something is bound to go wrong. And that is exactly what happened, much to Wimbledon Chief Sally Bolton’s embarrassment, this past Sunday.

In a match between Sonay Kartal and Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova, the German official, Nico Helmwerth, who was manning the net, ordered a crucial point to be replayed during a fourth-round tie. Unfortunately, however, the ball-tracking technology that oftentimes determines whether a shot was in or out was turned off. The All England Club that manages the tournament was then forced to issue an apology for such a blatant error.

When pressed on the subject later on, Wimbledon’s Chief, Sally Bolton, laid the blame on Helmwerth, stating that the technology was erroneously turned off, but the umpire should have made the call himself. “The chair umpire has primacy on court. So in an instance where the electronic line system goes down, the chair still has primacy to call the line.” Bolton said.

“And I think in the incident you saw yesterday, you saw that he called a couple of those points out. He wasn’t informed that the system had been deactivated in error. When we got to the third call, he made the decision to stop. But the chair umpire has primacy on court, so that is the job of the chair umpire,” she continued.

Bolton, further, didn’t share much information into why the system was deactivated in the first place, saying about the mishap, “I don’t know – it was a mistake obviously. “

Other mishaps that have taken place at Wimbledon this year

In a third-round game this past Saturday, Daria Kasatkina, the Russian-Australian player, lost a point because her hanging earring got stuck to the sleeve of her shirt when her opponent, Liudmila Samsonova, returned a shot. Kasatkina couldn’t respond in time, and after this crucial point, ultimately lost the game!

And it certainly hasn’t been smooth sailing on the men’s side of things either. Wimbledon just issued a huge fine to the defending men’s doubles champion Henry Patten after he was said to have abused staff for cutting his practice short. Patten is supposed to pay £9,000 for verbally abusing the staff, a solid amount, considering the second highest fine this year is £4,400, issued to Adrian Mannarino for unsportsmanlike behavior in his second-round match with Valentin Royer.

So clearly, Sally Bolton has a lot on her plate. But the fact that Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova went on to tell Helmsworth, “You took the game away from me. … They stole the game from me. They stole it” certainly seems to be the most pressing issue of the tournament so far.