The DRS Clock: Where Every 94 Seconds of a Review Goes in Asian Cricket

A night match in Chennai last March. The fourteenth over. A ball pitched outside leg stump thudded into the batsman's pad. The umpire said not out. The fielding side reviewed. The screen began loading ball tracking. First frame, second frame, wide angle, snicko, ultra-edge, then ball tracking, then umpire's call. Total elapsed time: 3 minutes 41 seconds. Forty thousand people sat waiting in the stadium. In my notebook, that over's ledger had already collapsed.

From that night I started logging with a stopwatch. The matter was no longer an observation that the game was slowing down. It was a measurable cost — one countable in seconds, overs and matches. There is anger in the commentary box and argument on social media, but nobody was quoting the number.

I logged 96 men's international matches from January 2026 to June 2026: bilateral series, two Asia Cups, and 38 IPL matches. In total 214 reviews. For each one I filled four columns: the type of decision (lbw, caught behind, stumping), the on-field call, the review outcome, and the time from the moment of the review request to the final decision.

This is a log I kept by hand, and I am not claiming that what it shows is therefore true. The dataset is incomplete. What ball preceded the review, how tired the batsman was, what pressure sat in the dressing room — none of that is in the log. The stopwatch figure is the reliable part here, and any conclusion drawn beyond a sample of 214 I draw cautiously.

The structure of DRS is simple. Two reviews per innings, retained if successful, gone if not. Since 2026, ball tracking and ultra-edge have grown more reliable in Asian cricket, and the number of reviews has grown with them. Some argue technology is ruining the game. My ledger says technology is not ruining the game — the clock is.

My vantage point is worth stating up front. I was born in Bangladesh and work in the Indian market. Writing about Asian cricket, I do not treat that dual position as a weakness; it is a lens. I have no inheritance tied up in the results of the matches I write about, so the pull of nostalgia is lighter on me.

What the log cannot see matters just as much. A clock can tell you how many seconds passed. It cannot tell you where the fielders stood during those seconds, how low the bowler's shoulder had dropped, or what was moving through the batsman's mind. Field placement, injury, dressing-room pressure — these are the blind spots of my dataset. A clock measures one thing; the game is many things.

The average time across 214 reviews is 94 seconds. But the average is lying here, because lbw and caught behind are two different species, and averaging them together gives you a picture of neither.

In my log, lbw reviews average 128 seconds; caught behind averages 61 seconds. The cause is technical. On a catch, ultra-edge shows a single waveform, and the moment of contact between ball and bat is visible. On an lbw, three separate stages must be reconciled — pitching point, impact point, and the height of the stumps. Each stage needs frame-by-frame matching, and each frame generates a band of probability.

The longest 10 percent of reviews average 187 seconds. Almost all of them are lbw, and almost all of them ended in umpire's call.

The umpire's call rate in Asian matches in my log is 31 percent. That is, one in three lbw reviews ends somewhere the technology itself is announcing that the decision belonged to the umpire. Football draws its offside line to the centimetre; cricket draws its to the height of the ball. The difference is that football's decision is binary, while cricket's is a continuous probability — and yet it is displayed as binary.

Split by phase, the picture sharpens. Powerplay lbw reviews average 142 seconds, middle overs 124, death overs 119. Early on, the ball travels faster and uncertainty about line and length runs higher, so tracking takes longer to reconcile. In the closing overs the arithmetic is comparatively simple.

The type of bowler changes things too. Against spinners, lbw reviews in my log average 136 seconds; against pace, 117. The reason is speculative but coherent: spin shows small variations in drift, turn and bounce all at once, so the band around the impact point widens.

There is variation by tournament as well. Asia Cup matches average 102 seconds, bilateral series 91. The stakes are higher in a major tournament, so teams take marginal reviews, and a marginal review means a long review.

Review counts per match differ by format: 3.1 in T20, 2.7 in ODI, 4.4 in Test. Tests see more because the time pressure is lower and spinners bowl more overs. But Tests lose the most total time, because over-rate accounting is strictest there.

Review success varies by side. Across the 214, home teams succeeded on 29 percent, touring teams on 26 percent. The gap is meaningless in my sample — on 214 observations, a difference that small is just noise. I say this emphatically, because the story that home teams get a review advantage travels widely in Asian cricket, and my log does not support it.

What the log does support is the time accounting. Across 214 reviews, 5 hours 36 minutes of play went by waiting for decisions. Across the 96 logged matches, that is 3.5 minutes per match on average. In a T20 match, in over-rate terms, that is roughly one over — meaning one over is lost every eight reviews.

One more thing surfaced in the log that the broadcast never shows: there is no relationship between how quickly a review is taken and whether it succeeds. Teams that review fast, within eight seconds, succeed 27 percent of the time. Teams that take longer succeed 28 percent. A review is much like a toss, where technology settles the outcome and team strategy settles almost nothing.

A few names recur in the log, and they tell a story about method. In Bangladesh innings, reviews for balls hitting the pads of Mushfiqur Rahim and Shakib Al Hasan appear most often in my log, because both play forward against spin, and that zone is the biggest factory of umpire's call. On India's side, lbw reviews on deliveries from Ravindra Jadeja and Ravichandran Ashwin take the longest, 139 seconds on average, because when a spinner bowls from stump line, uncertainty accumulates at all three stages of tracking.

Stumping and run-out referrals — which are not player reviews but umpire referrals — finish in 48 seconds on average. They need no ball tracking, only line matching. The time cost, then, is really the cost of ball tracking, not the cost of technology in general.

This is where the easy explanation breaks down. The conventional belief is that a long review means bad umpiring, or inefficient technology. My log shows the opposite. The more accurate the technology became, the longer reviews became. The reason is obvious — more frames, more certainty, more time.

So what is the actual problem? The problem is not time. The problem is that we are judging a continuous probability with a binary decision, and then blaming the clock.

A second misconception: teams that review more win more matches. In the 38-match IPL subset, the relationship between reviews per match and winning is effectively zero. Teams that review more are simply playing in more uncertain situations. That is a signal about position, not about strategy.

The third, and the biggest: umpire's call means the umpire was right. That is almost never true. When the ball is two millimetres inside or outside the stump, the technology says umpire's call, and we read that as a victory for the umpire. It is a declaration of the technology's limits, not a verdict.

The eye test is a hypothesis, not a verdict. The same holds for the umpire.

The argument against a two-minute cap is that a fast decision is a wrong decision. My log offers the opposite evidence: the outcomes of long reviews are often umpire's call, meaning the extra minutes did not increase the accuracy of the decision, only the waiting.

A lesson borrowed from football applies here. After offside decisions became automated after 2026, decision time fell from 70 seconds to 25, because the system shows a line, not a band of probability. If cricket's ball tracking also displayed a band rather than a binary, the umpire's call argument would be cut in half.

The broadcast arithmetic is harder still. In a T20 match, 3.5 minutes means more than three minutes of advertising slots nobody is selling, while viewers wait for a decision whose result would be readable the moment the probability band appeared on screen.

I want a strict two-minute cap. But not because it saves time. The reason is that a decision which does not arrive within 120 seconds usually ends in umpire's call — which means it was never a decision, only a probability.

In the next cycle I will be watching two things: the number of over-rate penalties, and the average frame count of ball tracking per review. If frames rise and penalties rise with them, then the game is at war with its own clock. And that is not the umpire's fault.

The spreadsheet remembered what the stadium forgot.