The 29 Penalties of Russia: How a World Cup Ledger Taught Cricket to Question Its Own DRS Verdicts

June 16, 2026, Kazan Arena. The 58th minute of France vs Australia. A dead-ball touch from Antoine Griezmann brought Josh Risdon's hand forward, the ball struck it. Referee Andres Cunha gave nothing initially. Then, standing in the mixed zone, I watched a decision change on the Video Assistant Referee screen—for the first time in World Cup history, a penalty was awarded via video review. Griezmann converted it. While 45,000 spectators celebrated, I was writing a number in my notebook. How did I know that night that this single entry would later become a tally of 29 penalties, and that tally would change everything I thought about cricket's DRS adjudication?

That tournament, I logged every decision across 64 matches. I filed 41 reports in 33 days. I slept badly, but I read the IFAB video referee protocol twice. By the time Russia ended, the notebook figure stood at 29. FIFA itself stated that roughly 20 decisions were corrected through video review. These numbers are not dry statistics. They are evidence of a specific question: when an entire control mechanism of a sport is handed over to a screen, who decides, and who merely waits?

That summer I learned something that changed the rhythm of my cricket writing. Where the rule is the evidence, the question is not whether the decision was right—the question is who made it and under what conditions. Cricket's Decision Review System (DRS) is precisely such a mechanism. But DRS, unlike football's VAR, has never been measured across an entire tournament with a transparent ledger. After 2026, FIFA published a specific statistic: one corrected decision every 3.2 matches. Cricket has no such data. Because cricket administrators have never treated DRS as an audited audit process.

India, Bangladesh, England—wherever I have covered cricket, the DRS discussion has almost always ended with one phrase: "Umpire's Call." That phrase is the equivalent of football's "clear and obvious error." But football defined its threshold after 2026, wrote it into public documents, and measured it with statistics after every tournament. Cricket still does not separately explain per tournament how many errors the review system actually caught and how many it committed.

At the 2026 T20 World Cup, I logged a review in a South Africa vs Sri Lanka match. In the 19th over, a low full toss landed on the leg side; the on-field umpire gave not out. A review was claimed. After projection, the ball landed inside the pitch margin—meaning Umpire's Call would stand. The decision was upheld. That night, the entry I wrote beside the decision was: "Umpire's Call is neither right nor wrong. It is a necessary fault tolerance." This is my core observation. The problem with DRS is not the accuracy of decisions; the problem is the lack of operational transparency. Football's VAR delivers an audit report after every tournament; cricket does not.

Let me give an example from my own ledger. The 2026 FIFA World Cup had 29 penalties. Of these, 11 were awarded after video review. FIFA released a public toolkit—the reason for each review, the threshold, and the decision. In cricket, neither the BCCI nor the ICC published a full DRS audit even after the 2026 World Cup. I keep my own ledger for every tournament. At the 2026 World Cup, I logged nine cases of measurement error, six of which related to the estimative margin of ball-tracking.

Now my counter-question. Some of us who criticize DRS as an adjudicative process believe that operational transparency would weaken the system—because then every decision would be questioned. But football's experience says the opposite. After 2026, when FIFA began publishing statistics, attacks on referees did not increase but decreased. Because people fear the unknown process. When the process becomes visible, distrust of decisions decreases.

This lack of visibility is most evident in cricket's DRS system. The ICC publishes only one document before each tournament: the Playing Conditions. But where is the full audit committee report after a tournament? FIFA did it after 2026. Why won't the ICC?

I offer a specific proposal for this change. After every tournament, the ICC should publish a Video Review Audit, containing: total reviews claimed, how many succeeded, how many hit Umpire's Call, and what percentage margin existed in ball-tracking. This is no fantasy; in football such documentation is public. The 29-penalty ledger taught me that every decision is an entry, and every entry is a question. The day cricket publishes its DRS ledger, we will no longer wonder what Umpire's Call actually is. We will know.

The question still stands: will the ICC publish a DRS audit after the 2026 T20 World Cup? Or will we pass another tournament, and another number will accumulate in the notebook—without proof.