For hundreds of years the umpire's word had been law in the game of cricket, until one afternoon in the summer of 2001, when umpire Pete Watts turned to the pavilion in Little Chart with a quizzical look on his face, and a new era began.

Hawk-Eye, the ball-tracking technology now known to sports fans around the world, was about to make its first-ever official decision in a competitive game, a match between Smarden and Little Chart - much to the relief of the Little Chart batsman - who Hawk-Eye ruled was not-out LBW (Leg Before Wicket).

"Pete dined out on that for years," recalled Smarden fan Paul Ryan. "He was the first umpire to use Hawk-Eye as an aid."

And yet it's not strictly true to call Paul a Smarden "fan", because if anything he had grown up with a near disdain for the game of cricket, which alongside rugby was the game of choice at Maidstone Grammar School. So what was he even doing down at Smarden that day?

It all began back at Maidstone Grammar School in 1971, when Paul and fellow 6th former Martin Passmore had been given the chance to make some Python-esque comedy sketches on the school video camera - and while those sketches have long since been lost to history, for good or ill, they won them the chance to make a documentary on the school and discover a love for TV in the process.

"Other people had Black Sabbath and Status Quo posters on their walls," says Paul, recalling how his obsession for TV had developed. "I had photos of the EM 2001 colour TV camera cut out from the Blue Peter Book of Television"

A communications course at Plymouth Polytechnic followed, before Paul embarked on a career with LWT for the next twenty years - cricket by then just a distant memory of boring summer afternoons back at school.

But when the ex-Maidstone Grammar boy moved to Sports production company Sunset+Vine in 1999, cricket was to sweep back into his life like a vengeful Shane Warne leg-break.

"They had just won the Channel 4 cricket contract," recalled Paul. "When they won it, it was the first time cricket was on commercial TV, so we were told we needed to widen the audience and draw more people in.

"I was ideal because I wasn't into cricket, so the producer said 'what is it about cricket you don't get?'. I said one of the things is LBW decisions - I never understand how the umpire can make that decision from so far away."

With Channel 4 keen on finding new TV gimmicks - like the 'Snickometer' which showed if a passing ball had faintly grazed the bat - Paul was tasked with looking into a way of visually expanding on Leg Before Wicket decisions, where a batsman can be given out if a ball is blocked from hitting the stumps by their leg.

Such decisions could be notoriously difficult, with the umpire having to judge if the ball - which could be swerving or spinning at speed - would indeed have hit the stumps, or missed it by millimetres, but could technology be used to judge and visually display the theoretical path of the ball?

"I found an American company that was doing something similar in baseball," said Paul. "They came over here, but it was like the blind leading the blind because they knew less about cricket than me."

Thankfully, Paul found help from a young technology wizard, Paul Hawkins, who had an idea of how he could use declassified missile tracking technology to track the flight of a cricket ball.

"He's very theoretical, but I had to turn it into something that would work in a broadcasting environment," recalled Paul. "The two of us were a perfect combination."

Paul managed to persuade Sunset+Vine to invest £250,000 in the project, and in 2001 Channel 4 brought in Hawk-Eye, along with other new TV gimmicks, a sexy new theme tune in the form of Lou Bega's Mambo No.5, and a new presenter in ex-cricketer Mark Nicholas, who oozed almost as much lustful charisma as Bega, albeit in a slightly more English style.

"The camera loves him,” wrote Giles Smith in The Daily Telegraph, “and its love does not, shall we say, go unrequited.”

Traditional cricket fans might have disapproved of the razzmatazz, with the likes of Geoffrey Boycott and Fred Trueman scowling under their hats or muttering bitterly into their pints - but Channel 4's approach was winning new fans for the game, and four years later the broadcaster and its new game would combine in a perfect storm in the explosive 2005 Ashes series.

Meanwhile though, Hawk-Eye was just an enlightening tool for the viewing fans, and had not been adopted for on-field decisions by cricket officials.

Yet to explode into a game-changing phenomenon world-wide, Hawk-Eye would be driven from game to game in a Paul's van - and when there wasn't a game it would just be parked up at his home in Smarden.

"My son was still living at home and he became the first Hawkeye operator," said Paul. "We had a small blue van which was parked on our driveway.

"One day I was in the Flying Horse pub in Smarden, and was speaking to some of the cricket team. They had seen Hawk-Eye and I said it's parked up on the driveway. They said 'we're playing Little Chart tomorrow can you bring it down?' So we drove it down to Little Chart.

Paul and his son Chris set up the cameras to looking down the track, and connected them to a monitor in the pavillion, where players, club members and fans could watch the magical new piece of technology.

Still, at this point the idea was just to entertain fans, rather than assist the umpire.

"After every ball I would show Hawk-Eye and at the end of an over I would show all six balls," said Paul. "Three overs in there was an LBW shout. Pete Watts the Smarden umpire said it was out but Hawk-Eye showed it wasn’t out - and there were howls of derision from the clubhouse."

"Two overs later there was another LBW appeal and Pete turned to the clubhouse and asked what Hawk-Eye said - then he waited for the answer before he made his decision, which was not-out."

And so the rest was history.

In 2008 the International Cricket Council ran a trial using Hawk-Eye for referring decisions to the third umpire if a team disagreed with an LBW decision, and the technology went on to become a mainstay of the game.

It was also picked up by a host of sports including tennis, Gaelic football, volleyball, badminton, hurling, and rugby union – so having started as three men in a small van working on Channel 4 Cricket, 22 years later Hawkeye has been developed for 27 sports in 40 countries with a staff of 1200.

As for the old grammar school documentary, Paul thought he'd lost it forever after handing the tapes over to company in London in the 1980s, hoping to have it converted from Super-8 film to tape, only for the company to go bust.

"I gave it to them and it got lost for 15 years," he recalled. "Fifteen years later I found a company called Active Video Services, which was similar to the name of the original company. I rang them up and said are you the same company?

They said why do you want to know? I asked if they had the film and he said does it have - 'Olim Meminisse Juvabit' written on it?"

That was the Maidstone Grammar School motto, which ironically means 'A joy it will be one day, perhaps, to remember even this.'

Paul added: "He was about to throw it away because they were having a clearout. The best bit was - bearing in mind it was 15 years since I saw it - he said 'it will be ready on Tuesday'. I said 'you stay where you are, I'll be round there now.'

"I was almost in tears when I saw it. I thought it had been lost forever."

Meanwhile this year’s Ashes series will be won or lost forever by the end of the month, but as for who will lift the trophy - only time and fate, and maybe Hawk-Eye, will tell.