Umpire's Call: Cricket's Review System Files More Disputes Than It Settles

The match was in the second session of day three. The spinner released, the batter was struck on the pad. The umpire did not raise the finger — not out. The fielding side reviewed. Ball-tracking appeared on screen: the ball was hitting leg stump, but only by 38 percent. The chart stayed unchanged — 'Umpire's Call.' The batter survived. Three words blazed across the giant screen, and the fielding captain lowered his head to reconcile the arithmetic of his own review.

I have watched this scene many times from a studio in Brisbane. In 2026, when I first picked up a pen as a cricket reporter on The Daily Star sports desk, the word 'review' did not exist in the cricket dictionary. Today the review system has built a separate layer inside the game — one where the umpire does not merely give a decision, he becomes part of a file.

The Decision Review System, DRS for short, arrived on the big stage at the 2026 World Cup. But its apprenticeship began earlier — in July 2026, it was trialled in the India-Sri Lanka Test in Colombo. At first it combined Hawk-Eye, Virtual Eye, Hot Spot and Snicko. The ICC called it a tool to correct 'clear and obvious errors.' But a single clause slipped into the laws and changed the fate of the entire system — 'Umpire's Call.'

Under the rule, if ball-tracking shows the ball striking less than half of the stump, the on-field umpire's decision stands as final. The technology does not make the call; it merely seeks corroboration for the on-field call. When DRS first appeared at a major tournament in the 2026 World Cup, many assumed the technology would ease the pressure on umpires. The opposite happened — a review possibility attached itself to every decision, and the weight of every nod of an umpire's head grew heavier.

The rule was never simple at the start. How much of the pitch a delivery may hit, where ball-tracking begins, how the pitching line is measured — the answers were revised year after year. Each revision meant learning the system anew. In Tests, each side gets two reviews per innings; in limited-overs cricket, one. A wrong review is lost. This quota and its outcome together have created a fresh strategic layer in cricket.

The cost of the technology is no small matter either. The infrastructure needed to run ball-tracking, UltraEdge and Snicko at every match is not easy for a small cricket board. So DRS brings equality of decision on one side, and equality of technology by series status on the other — more in big series, less in small ones.

Over the years I have noticed that the biggest impact of DRS has fallen on the umpire's power — and squarely in the opposite direction to what technology's critics assume.

First, the asymmetry of outcome. In LBW, ball-tracking is really a prediction — it says where the ball would have gone. But it is a model, not reality. The seam, the friction of the pitch, the wind — all are estimated in the model. That estimate carries a margin of error, usually a few millimetres. Yet the viewer treats the line on screen as final truth. Here lies the technology's greatest deception — a perfect image that is nonetheless an estimated image.

Second, the two tiers of decision. When the on-field umpire gives out, the technology must show 'clear evidence' to overturn it. But when the umpire gives not out, the batter has less room to be saved by the technology. This asymmetry gave birth to 'Umpire's Call.'

I keep a small table of my own, logging the ratio of successful to wasted reviews in Test matches. One pattern returns again and again: sides that understand an umpire's natural limits — who stands how far away and sees how much — waste fewer reviews. That is not the intelligence of technology, it is the intelligence of understanding technology's limits.

Third, the matter of memory. Every review becomes a document — who took how many, when, and how many succeeded. That record travels beyond the match and builds a side's reputation. If a batter repeatedly takes poor reviews, the umpire and the crowd alike view his review with suspicion in the next match. Technology settles decisions, but it builds reputations — and reputation's ledger is the cruellest of all.

Bangladesh and Australia take different paths here. In Bangladesh's cricket culture, questioning an umpire's decision is a fairly new habit — authority and deference are traditionally stronger. Experienced wicketkeeper-batters like Mushfiqur Rahim or all-rounders like Shakib Al Hasan have learned this arithmetic over time, but as a team the habit has formed slowly. In Australia's professional system, a review is a clean calculation — quota, probability and risk weighed together; a batter like Steve Smith trusts his own DRS sense before reviewing. India's Virat Kohli balances the analyst's signal with his own six-inch instinct before a review. Both cultures use DRS differently, even though the law is one.

Here lies the curious counter-truth. DRS was introduced to help the umpire. The result is the reverse — the technology has increased the umpire's power, not reduced it. The reason is simple. The rule called 'Umpire's Call' actually gives the umpire's original decision a shield. Where the technology is clear, it intervenes; where it is not, it steps back. So a single umpiring decision now survives two tiers of scrutiny — and surviving makes it seem all the more authoritative.

The second counter-truth is that players now play 'probability,' not 'truth.' Taking a review is not a search for truth but a calculation — how likely is success? The umpire's zone, the state of the pitch, the age of the ball — the side runs the numbers. That is why the same kind of impact sometimes brings a review and sometimes does not. Together these two truths leave this: DRS has not reduced disputes, it has relocated them. Once the question was 'Did the umpire err?' Now it is 'Did the technology measure correctly?' The question has moved from the field to the screen. And as more questions drift to the screen, the umpire's decision slips deeper into a quiet protection.

At the ICC Cricket Committee's discussions in 2026, the proposal to remove 'Umpire's Call' returned. The question still hangs — because the answer is not merely about law, but about authority. If technology is truly the referee of the future, why keep the umpire's mediation? And if the umpire's eye is the last word, why ball-tracking at all? Cricket now stands between two referees — one human, one machine. Which one to grant final power is the real review.