The Review Ledger: Cricket's Chain of Custody and the Case for a Public Ledger

In my desk ledger, one entry from last season is still written in wet ink: an LBW review, two minutes and forty-one seconds, three camera angles, one ball-tracking projection, and two words rising on the monitor — umpire's call. Twenty-seven thousand people in the ground could not understand why the decision stood when the ball was heading into leg stump. I went home, opened the ledger, and the story changed.

The reason hides inside the law. Under the ICC playing conditions, if ball-tracking shows the ball travelling towards the stumps but the point of impact is in line and less than half the ball is projected to hit the stump, the on-field umpire's decision stands. That is umpire's call. The clause has existed since DRS was formalised in 2026, yet for the crowd it lands as a fresh blow every single time.

This is where cricket's largest administrative question sits. Where does a decision come from, who owns it, and who keeps its record? Until those three answers are clear, better technology will not produce trust.

DRS was first trialled in the 2026 Sri Lanka-India series. Hot Spot, Snicko, ball-tracking — television technology walked step by step onto the field beside the umpire. Reviews were limited at first; today Tests allow two per innings, limited-overs cricket allows two, and a review is retained when the verdict is umpire's call. A side has fifteen seconds to ask. Every clause, every deadline, every threshold is an entry.

I was always sceptical of technology. When video explainers arrived in the newsroom, I was the last writer to agree they were here to stay. But once I agreed, I became the strictest person in the room — because I know a tool's real value lies not in its output but in its record.

My twenty years of match-watching produce one clean pattern: the number of reviews has risen, the resentment has not fallen. The number that grew was not trust; it was uncertainty. India against Bangladesh, Australia against England, experienced campaigners like Virat Kohli or Shakib Al Hasan calculate their reviews carefully, and still the crowd ends up trusting the projection, not the umpire.

First, ball-tracking calibration. The projection is built from camera frames, trajectory models, and pitch friction. Once the ball pitches, its spin, the seam position, the moisture of the surface all enter the model. My ledger records the same bowler, a near-identical delivery, and two different projections at two ends of the same pitch. That is not a technology failure; that is a model limit. The question is who publishes the limit.

Second, UltraEdge. The edge of the bat and the gap beside the pad produce a spike that occurs between two frames, measured by frame rate. I have watched the same delivery stay silent in one frame and spike in the next. Which frame is true depends on the judgement of a person sitting in a box.

The chain of custody breaks exactly where what is shown on the screen and what is stored in the record begin to diverge.

Third, ownership. The ball-tracking feed, the UltraEdge feed, the Spidercam — the technical control sits with the broadcaster. The ICC writes the protocol, the umpire gives the verdict, but the calibration certificates, the frame data, the sensor logs rarely reach the public. The match referee's report carries the decision, not the raw material of the decision.

This is where blockchain enters. I am not here to write about crypto. The property of blockchain that cricket can use is a timestamped, tamper-evident, publicly verifiable ledger. Cricket has been a ledger game since birth — scorebook, over-rate sheet, DRS log, match referee ruling. Blockchain is not new; it is the digital, tamper-proof edition of that ledger.

If every review is a block, each block's hash links to the precedent before it. Change the data later and the chain breaks — that is real accountability.

In my private log I record umpires' tendencies — who raises the finger quickly on LBW, who stays cautious outside off stump. If those patterns were public, a viewer could judge a decision with data instead of feeling.

Here is the counter-intuitive point. The anger over umpire's call is aimed at the wrong target. The problem is not technology; the problem is an asymmetry of disclosure. At football's 2026 World Cup I sat and watched the screen become a second referee — that was football's VAR, not cricket's DRS. The laws differ, the review architecture differs. VAR calls the on-field referee over; in cricket the on-field umpire stays final and the third umpire only examines evidence.

I think umpire's call is the most honest part of the system. It says plainly: our measurement is not good enough here. Discipline, to me, is a ledger, not a mood; a don't-know column is not weakness, it is honesty.

The real weakness is elsewhere. We show the viewer the final image of the projection and hide the line of its uncertainty. We announce out or not out, and never explain why a half-ball margin is the boundary of the decision.

My proposal is simple. The ICC should publish a public review ledger after every match — the time of each review, the camera angles, the calibration version, the final verdict. Calibration files should be public each series. And if franchise-league payments move to smart contracts, the same ledger structure can carry doping sample logs and anti-corruption records.

I am eighty per cent confident that within three years at least one leading board will launch a public review ledger. I will be proved wrong if, two seasons from now, calibration data is still neither stored nor published.

The game does not change through technology. It changes when someone is brave enough to open the ledger and show it.