Umpire's Call: The Question DRS Never Asks

2026, Edgbaston. First Test, first day, late in the morning session. Ben Stokes's delivery thuds into Virat Kohli's pad. Umpire Kumar Dharmasena's finger goes up — lbw. Kohli reviews without hesitation. The familiar process begins on the third umpire's screen: UltraEdge, ball-tracking, projection. The screen shows the ball tracking towards the stumps, but one parameter stays uncertain. Result: Umpire's Call — out stands. After the match, Kohli told reporters, “I will remember this decision.”

I remember it too. In my ledger for 2026, this was the first of 47 umpire's call decisions that year. Four columns — minute, incident, law, outcome. Not the reasoning behind each call; which minute the call fell in — that is the language of my notebook. I have gone back to the whiteboard repeatedly, searching for where cricket's unyielding ledger first learned to bend.

In January 2026, Steve Bucknor's disputed calls in the Sydney Test broke world cricket's patience. In response, the ICC hurried towards DRS — first trialed in the India–Sri Lanka series in August 2026. From the start, the system was not a perfect instrument but an institutional compromise. The ball-tracking companies themselves conceded an error margin of 11 to 15 millimetres. The ICC named this band of uncertainty 'Umpire's Call'. Where technology cannot be certain, the on-field umpire's decision remains final. In DRS's design, a human being is tacitly granted the last word.

The VAR ledger I built after watching all 64 matches of the 2026 Russia World Cup twice taught me to read cricket's DRS — the protocol question is the same on both fields. Where football's VAR plays politics with 'clear and obvious', cricket does it with margin arithmetic.

Bangladesh's relationship with that tacit power has been uneasy for a long time. We adopted DRS later than most nations, repeatedly voicing doubts over cost and reliability. When it was finally accepted, our team's review usage was emotional: the dismissed batter's cry of frustration, the dugout's prodding. My ledger shows that year after year Bangladesh's review success rate ran well below the leading ICC nations — because we did not spend reviews conservatively; we spent them on emotion.

This is the core point. Umpire's Call is a kind of vote: unless technology is 'certain' — beyond that 11-15 millimetre margin — the on-field umpire's ruling holds. At Edgbaston, the moment Kohli reviewed, even he could not know that this decision had no 'correct' answer. The ball projected to clip the top of the stumps, but the height at which it struck the pad sat inside the margin. This dual arithmetic creates a zone that is neither wrong nor right.

After Ben Stokes's bat deflected the ball to the boundary in the 2026 World Cup final, Marylebone Cricket Club amended Law 19. A match's highlight proved that cricket's law does not pursue truth; it advances through the adaptation of human-made rules. DRS is no different. It does not state truth; it states a process. To keep that process on record, I have long argued for an immutable ledger — a blockchain. Every review's timestamp, the raw UltraEdge data, the millimetre margins of ball-tracking, the third umpire's video notes — all stored immutably, so that no one has to rely on memory.

Please don't wince at blockchain and cricket in the same sentence. The ICC itself signed a deal with FanCraze in 2026 to launch official digital collectibles. Their question was money; mine is accountability. If a call made on the field is recorded in an immutable ledger, no one needs to knock on anyone's door asking whether it was correct. The ledger will say — at which minute, under which protocol, within which margin the whistle bent.

The orthodox view says Umpire's Call is unfair to bowlers. My ledger says otherwise. This call protects no one in particular; it is a declaration of faith in technology. The team that can read an umpire's tendencies — who raises his finger to balls outside off stump, who walks towards not-out on slight height — survives in this zone. Teams like Bangladesh do not keep such tendency ledgers, and so they stumble again and again on identical decisions. Since 2026, when the ICC introduced two reviews per innings, a review has been a resource — the team that throws it away repents at the price of that resource forty overs later.

The human being in this crowd should be mentioned too. On that Edgbaston night, Dharmasena's final call followed the law, yet afterward he faced further controversy in the same series. The silent ground of 2026 — the umpire–player exchanges caught in empty stadiums — keeps reminding me that the part of officiating the cameras never show is the part that speaks loudest. In this profession, decisions are made with thousands of cameras watching your finger — the whole world as witness. When the court of law hangs on one person's finger, 'correctness' becomes secondary and 'tolerability' primary. Where the boundary of that tolerability lies is written nowhere in the law.

Camera-based DRS 2.0 is already in trial. As the error margin shrinks, the umpire's call zone will shrink too. But the moment the zone passes to the machine, the eternal question remains: who audits the protocol that delivers decisions? Not the on-field umpire, not the third umpire — not even the Google that shows data 'live' during the match. On the last page of my ledger, this remains the most unresolved of clauses.