Wimbledon 2025: Controversy Erupts as Organisers Forced to Apologise For 'Stealing' Game From Russia's Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova

The Wimbledon 2025 tennis Grand Slam is one of the tournaments that has retained its charm by largely sticking to tradition, but the grass court event took the call to replace line referees with an electronic line calling system that uses technology and artificial intelligence, or AI for short, in a bid to streamline line calls. 

However, the match between Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova and Sonay Kartal saw a controversial line call take place which forced the All England Club to actually issue an apology for missing what seemed a fairly straightforward decision and resulted in Pavlyuchenkova claim that a game was ‘stolen’ from here. 

In the first set of the fourth round match, a shot from Kartal clearly went long but there was no out call from the technology, prompting Pavlyuchenkova to stop playing and the chair umpire halted play. 

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Pavlyuchenkova's Big Claim

But the Russian was not happy and could be heard on the television broadcast having a heated discussion with the umpire. 

"You took the game away from me... they stole the game from me. They stole it," she said. 

She would go on to win the match anyway, so the error did not prove as costly as it could have been but she was not happy even after the match was done. 

“He (the referee) also saw it out, he told me after the match. I thought he would do that, but he didn't. Instead they just said replay. I don't know if it's something to do (with Kartal being) local. I think it's also difficult for him. He probably was scared to take such a big decision.”

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All England Club Apologise For Error

The Wimbledon organisers, the All England Club, said afterwards that while they had full confidence in the technology, they had apologised to the players and gave reasons for the failure. 

"We have apologised to the players involved. In this instance, there was a human error and as a consequence we have fully reviewed our processes and made the appropriate changes," said a spokesperson for the All England Club.

The technology has been championed by many a player but others have also said that it needs fine tuning before it can be properly used.