The 92-Second DRS: Why the Review Is Now Cricket's Most Expensive Ninety Seconds

17 April 2026, 9:42 pm. Two tabs open: one streaming the match, the other a nearly empty spreadsheet. The column headers were already set — innings, over, ball, moment the review was requested, moment the verdict arrived, the gap between them. On the fourth ball of the 17th over the batter raised his arm. The fever rising through the ground dropped in a single second. The big screen spun through ball tracking; my stopwatch clicked 71, 78, 84 — and at 92 seconds the verdict landed. The ball had come in on line, but it had passed above stump height. Umpire's call. The field decision survived.

I typed 92 into the spreadsheet. Before that I had paused for ten seconds, because in those ninety-odd seconds the match lost something I have no column for.

I have no objection to the decision. The definition of umpire's call is clear, and its application here was correct. My objection is to the wait.

How the machine works

DRS first walked onto a field in July 2026, in a Sri Lanka-India Test in Colombo. Eighteen years later the architecture is unchanged: the field decision is the default, and overturning it demands conclusive evidence. On LBW, if the ball is clipping the stumps within the umpire's call margin, the original verdict stands. The request window is 15 seconds. T20 and ODI innings carry two reviews each, Tests three, and a successful review is retained.

In mid-2026 the ICC made one significant change: it abolished the soft signal on low catches. Previously the third umpire needed conclusive evidence to overrule the field's soft indication; now that layer is gone. As a rule, it is fairer. I accept that. But it carries an uncounted bill, and that bill is measured in time.

For fifteen years I have counted matches alongside watching them. Since that rule change my instinct said reviews were getting longer. But in my trade, "my instinct says" is a hypothesis, not a verdict. So this regular season, from February, I started keeping the log.

84 matches, 214 reviews

Between 1 February 2026 and 18 April 2026 — eleven and a half weeks — I logged every review across 84 men's T20 matches, franchise regular season plus bilateral series: 214 reviews in all. The stopwatch ran from the announcement of the review to the final on-screen graphic of the third umpire's verdict. Broadcast cuts and ad breaks are not captured in that window; that is the log's principal limitation, and I am stating it up front.

The results: mean duration 86.4 seconds, median 79 seconds. The longest ran 3 minutes 41 seconds; the fastest, 34 seconds. The mean sits seven or eight seconds above the median — meaning a handful of abnormal outliers are dragging the whole distribution.

Broken down by type, the picture sharpens. Low catches average 121 seconds, caught-behind 94, LBW 88. After the abolition of the soft signal, the low catch is the system's most expensive file, because the third umpire must reconcile the ball and the fingers across multiple angles.

I also measured where the time goes. The first replay arrives after roughly 22 seconds, the ball-tracking animation takes 38, and the third umpire's own deliberation takes 26. More than half the time belongs to the machine, not the umpire.

Of the 214 reviews, 31 per cent overturned the field decision and 14 per cent landed on the umpire's call boundary. One pattern stood out: 27 per cent of all reviews came between overs 16 and 20, even though only 20 per cent of balls are bowled there. The rate of reviews in the death overs runs about 35 per cent above expectation. With n=214 this is a tendency, not proof — but it is an interesting coincidence if it is one.

Across the 84 matches, review time totalled 18,490 seconds: 5 hours 8 minutes, or 3 minutes 40 seconds per match. A T20 match runs about 200 minutes. Reviews consume 1.8 per cent of total match time. In pure time terms, that is almost nothing.

So where is the problem? My log shows that in the over following a review lasting more than 90 seconds, the dot-ball rate hit 46.2 per cent against a match baseline of 38.9. And that is precisely where my first error surfaced.

The eye test is a hypothesis, not a verdict

I believed the wait broke the batter. The field sets deeper, the bowler sharpens the plan, and the batter returns cold. The log says the event happens, but in a much smaller frame, and in a different place than I imagined.

Of the 41 dot balls in that window, 34 came in the same over the review occurred in, late in it — not the following over. The shock does not cross an over boundary. The momentum-loss story is true, but local. At the level of team outcomes I cannot find a measurable trace of that damage.

And the most uncomfortable number: the correlation between review duration and decision accuracy is essentially zero — 0.03. A review decided in 40 seconds and one that takes 140 do not differ statistically in their rate of correction. The story the stadium tells itself — "the third umpire is thinking, so it must be complicated" — the spreadsheet does not believe. The spreadsheet remembered what the stadium forgot.

So what do the extra seconds buy? Not accuracy. They buy anticipation. The big screen, the tracking animation, the slow replay — these are part of a production. The question here is not cricket's, it is broadcasting's. And none of broadcasting lives in my spreadsheet. I keep a column for what the broadcast never shows: the small shifts in field placement, the glance at a bowler's shoulder, the pressure in a dressing room. My data cannot see any of those three things, and that is this log's largest gap. Bowlers get hit by the over-rate stick, but review time, as far as I read the regulations, rarely lands on anyone's account — and I think there is work worth doing on that asymmetry.

What to watch next round

Rules change slowly. So the first signal of reform will not appear on the screen; it will appear on a clock. If, in the coming season, a board or league trials a sixty-second review clock, my log has already filed a prediction: the overturn rate will not fall. Because those extra twenty-six seconds were never buying accuracy.

I will be watching for a timer appearing on-screen beside the third umpire. Its arrival would mean the issue has moved from debate to experiment. And one question genuinely hangs for me: the result does not change, but what 38,000 people feel while watching does. If the sport is, in the end, also a show, then who decides which is worth more — 92 seconds of accuracy, or the ninety seconds the stadium never gets back?