Sometimes two players disagree on the current score during a tennis match played without an on-court official. The correct procedure to resolve the dispute is to roll back the score until they reach agreement on the score at a previous point in the match. Play is resumed from there. In fact, if a roving official is summoned to the court that is usually how resolution is achieved. If the score was previously announced by one player without objection from the other, that is generally regarded as a point of agreement.
Because of that, there seems to be a de facto sense of finality when the score is called out by the chair umpire in an officiated match. However, it is possible for a line call to be corrected after the announcement of the score even in a fully officiated match.
That scenario is captured in one of the Case Decisions in the “Role of Court Officials” Appendix of the ITF Rules of Tennis.
Case: Is a line umpire allowed to change the call after the chair umpire has announced the score?
Appendix VI, Role of Court Officials, ITF Rules of Tennis, Case 6.
Decision: Yes. If a line umpire realises a mistake, a correction should be made as soon as possible provided it is not as the result of a protest or appeal of a player
One way this situation could seemingly occur is if there was crowd noise that prevented an umpire from hearing an audible call while screened off from the visual signal from the line official. If the umpire calls the score incorrectly, the line official can make the “correction” at that point. That wouldn’t exactly be correction of a line call, but rather a misunderstanding about it. That still may have been the root of this particular interpretation of tennis law.
Line umpires are not allowed to leave their post to inspect a mark. I suppose there are situations where a ball mark that could be sighted from their position. If visually locating the mark was coupled with a relatively quick score announcement by the umpire, then we would have the scenario where this correction would be the made and allowed.
In matches without an official, I have both witnessed and participated in disagreements over line calls made only after the score is announced. Typically that arises because a call was not clearly made or was not heard by one of the players. This case decision opens the door to a very late inspection of a mark should that situation arise.
Ball mark inspection procedures are in the next Appendix of the ITF Rules of Tennis. However, before we move into that section there are still two additional Case Decisions in the “Role of Court Officials” to cover.
