Handing Power to the Screen: Who Actually Keeps the DRS Ledger in Asian Cricket?

Handing Power to the Screen: Who Actually Keeps the DRS Ledger in Asian Cricket?

A group match of the Asia Cup at the Dubai International Cricket Stadium last September, fourteenth over. A left-arm orthodox spinner bowls, the batsman presses forward and defends with pad and bat together. The on-field umpire shakes his head: not out. The big screen fills with ball-tracking. The ball is shown hitting the stumps, yet the on-field call stands, because the portion of the ball inside the stump line is marginally more than half and the rest falls into 'umpire's call'. The batsman lifts his helmet and stares at the screen. The gallery roars.

That night I went back to my hotel room and opened my review log. Camera angle, duration, outcome, and which clause produced the verdict — I record all of it. I read the ledger again, and the story changed. The roar was aimed at the umpire. The ledger pointed elsewhere: the fault was not a man's, it was a design's.

In Asian cricket, DRS is not a triumph of technology; it is a geopolitical settlement.

Who Writes the Rule

One thing needs stating first, because most debates begin in the wrong place. DRS is not a law of cricket. The MCC Laws of Cricket contain no review system at all. DRS lives in the ICC's playing conditions. The Laws decide who is out; the playing conditions decide how much technology may be used to prove it, and how much may not.

The distinction is not merely documentary. Amending the Laws requires the MCC's assent and years of consensus among member countries. The playing conditions are amended by the ICC Cricket Committee — faster, with far less scrutiny. So the limits of DRS — how many reviews, where 'umpire's call' sits, where ball-tracking stops — are settled in a committee room, not on the field.

Put politely, DRS is a treaty: a power-sharing arrangement between the umpire on the field and the umpire at the monitor. Neither side lost outright. Neither won outright.

Asia's history is the witness to that treaty. First trials in 2026; first full application in the 2026 West Indies-England series. For years the subcontinent's largest board objected to the accuracy of ball-tracking. The argument was simple: a model that is accurate on grassy seam-bowling wickets is not equally accurate on spin-dominated ones. The objection did not survive, but its logic never died — it survives today inside 'umpire's call' and the three-metre rule. As a deliberate late adopter myself, I understand the weight of that objection.

What the Ledger Shows

Three patterns recur in the Asian context.

One: 'umpire's call' falls unevenly on spin-dominated wickets. Ball-tracking's prediction is a mathematical model, and the model's uncertainty grows with the amount of turn and the distance travelled. Compared with seam bowling, a spinner's delivery deviates far more after pitching and takes far longer to arrive. Confidence in whether a ball shown as 'marginally under half' would truly have struck is correspondingly lower. The ICC does not hide this uncertainty; it gives it a name and legitimises it.

Two: the three-metre rule ties the hands of review in Asian conditions. When the point of interception is more than three metres from the stumps, the wicket-prediction element of ball-tracking is not used, and the on-field decision is final. On Asia's spin-friendly surfaces batsmen habitually step out — Virat Kohli, Babar Azam, Shakib Al Hasan, Mushfiqur Rahim, all of them. So precisely where review is most needed, its power is most restricted.

Three: unequal distribution. The Asia Cup is run by the Asian Cricket Council, and the technology is usually supplied by Hawk-Eye. In bilateral series between two countries, however, the host board carries the ball-tracking cost, and for smaller boards a few thousand dollars per match is not trivial. The question that follows: the same umpire, the same kind of dismissal, two different standards of justice in two different series. Is that acceptable?

When the Screen Becomes a Second Referee

In Russia, I watched the screen become a second referee. During VAR's debut the argument around me was whether the game had been ruined. I was keeping a different ledger: angle, duration and outcome for every review. Across 64 matches what emerged was the average review time. Working on DRS in cricket later, I understood that VAR and DRS are two faces of one condition: authority migrates from the field to the monitor, and responsibility migrates to nobody.

In VAR, responsibility sits in the video referee's room. In DRS it splits three ways. The ball-tracking company says, 'We supplied a prediction.' The broadcaster says, 'We supplied the cameras.' The umpire says, 'We applied the rule.' Nobody says, 'The decision was wrong and it is on me.' That gap is what troubles me most.

This habit of displaced responsibility was clearest with catches. For years the on-field umpire gave a 'soft signal', and for the third umpire to overturn it, near-certain evidence was required. In 2026 the ICC abolished the soft signal. Low catches are now decided entirely by the third umpire. On paper this is reasonable — less room for bias. In practice authority moved one more step towards the monitor, and so did responsibility.

Similarly, Hot Spot infrared cameras once handled catch decisions. High cost and limited application pushed it out, and UltraEdge took its place. The history of technology here reads like a ledger too: what survived, stayed; what was expensive and unproven, went.

One more thing we routinely forget: the frame we see on screen is chosen by the broadcaster. Which angle comes first, which frame is slowed down, which is never shown at all — that editorial choice is commercial, not technical. My log records that in one series a catch review showed four angles on average, and in another, two. The number is small. That does not make the question small.

Bird's Eye Versus Ledger

Here is my counter-intuitive observation.

The fan's eye goes first to the umpire. The ledger goes first to the system. The fan concludes that a particular umpire is biased, or cracked under pressure. From years of watching matches, I can say that the same umpire gives the same kind of decision against both sides in the same series. The difference is manufactured at the confidence level of the ball-tracking model, not in the umpire's mood.

What rarely gets discussed is calibration. Camera placement at each venue, model verification before each match — that oversight belongs to the technology provider and the host broadcaster. ICC events retain central control; bilateral series do not. So who governs the quality of the data on which an umpire's decision is overturned varies from series to series.

I want to be precise here. I hold no evidence of a calibration fault in any specific Asian series. What I hold is inconsistency — and inconsistency is itself the finding. Absence of evidence and evidence of absence are different things.

A human note is necessary at this point, because a ledger covers people over. Picture a 52-year-old umpire from the subcontinent, standing in his two-hundredth international. His decision is now measured in percentages on a screen. What survives today as 'umpire's call' might have been overturned three years ago. His reputation depends on camera height and the revolutions on a ball. That is not his crime. It is his era.

What Can Be Changed

The ledger exists for correction as much as for complaint.

The first correction could be the term 'umpire's call' itself. The name suggests the call belongs to the umpire. In truth it is an acknowledgment of technological uncertainty, invoiced to the umpire's account. Rename it, and the argument's centre of gravity shifts, and responsibility returns to its proper room.

The second: broadcast the model's confidence level. How much did the ball turn, how certain is the model? If viewers could see that, they would understand why two similar dismissals produced two different verdicts.

The third: re-examine the three-metre rule. On spin-dominated Asian surfaces it effectively reduces the use of review. The ICC Cricket Committee should test the distance threshold and the model's path-dependence together, not on seam-bowling data alone.

The fourth: move technological control away from the host board. Where ICC events keep central oversight, bilateral series should at minimum carry a calibration audit. Who installed the cameras, who verified the model, where the report was filed — that much accounting is the bare minimum.

Closing

My review log taught me something that neither trophies nor trends can teach: discipline is a ledger, not a mood. Every entry carries a timestamp; every decision is quotable.

I am 80 per cent confident that over the next two years Asia's biggest umpiring controversy will not be about any particular DRS decision but about DRS access — who can afford to run it, and who cannot. That forecast will be falsified if the ICC announces a central technology fund for all member boards.

The umpire's eye sees the rule before the reaction. We should do the same. What we see on the screen is not a decision; it is a draft of one — and whose draft it is remains an open question.