Blockchain in Cricket's Review Room: Will the Umpire's Ledger Open to the Public?

Last December, sitting at the Sher-e-Bangla Stadium in Mirpur, I watched a review. The third umpire took four minutes and twenty-two seconds to reach a decision. On screen, ball-tracking, Snicko and hot-spot frames cycled again and again. In the end, the question of whether the ball touched the leg-stump line by a single centimetre in an LBW call changed the tempo of the match. I wrote in my ledger: minute 47.3, incident — LBW review, law — 36.1, outcome — out. But the ledger stayed mine. The crowd received only an outcome, not the process. The question starts here: why is the door still shut on the room where modern cricket's most expensive decisions are made?

Cricket's review system — the DRS — began in 2026, in a Sri Lanka-India series. At first it was only a player appeal. Then came "umpire's call", "UltraEdge", "ball-tracking", "Snicko". Each technology runs on a different company's server. Under the ICC Playing Conditions, the on-field umpire's decision stands unless a "clear and obvious error" is proven. The question is: who defines "clear and obvious"? Where is the protocol written? What the third umpire sees on the monitor, which frame comes before which, which frame is discarded — no independent audit trail of this has ever been opened to the public. Football brought in VAR in 2026, at the Russia World Cup; the same complaint surfaced there — nobody hears the conversation behind the decision. Cricket's DRS and football's VAR are both chasing the answer to one question: who controls the technology?

This is where blockchain enters. A blockchain is a distributed ledger — once an entry is written it cannot be erased, and every node keeps the same copy. In plain terms, it is a diary that no single person can write alone or alter alone. In cricket administration, that could mean: every review, every frame-selection, every "umpire's call" — all written to a public ledger with a timestamp. If someone later tries to change a decision, the ledger will prove when and by whose hand the change happened.

I went back to the whiteboard to see where the decision first learned to bend.

Now imagine what a blockchain-based review ledger might look like. The first layer: ball-by-ball data. Every delivery's ball-tracking, speed, spin-axis — all written as hashes. The second layer: the review call. When a player appeals, the timestamp goes automatically to the ledger. The third layer: the third umpire's frame-selection. Which frame shows the pitch, which the impact, which the stumps — each with its hash.

One big benefit of such a system: the end of the "soft signal" controversy. Today, if the on-field umpire gives "not out" and the review evidence is "inconclusive", the decision survives — a genuine guessing game. If the ledger records a confidence-score for every frame, the definition of "inconclusive" would no longer rest on a person's discretion. The dispute is not really about technology; the dispute is about opacity — and blockchain can, for the first time, keep the accounts of that opacity.

A second possibility: smart contracts. Imagine a contract that reads — "if ball-tracking shows more than 50 percent of the stumps, then out." Placed on the ledger, the decision would trigger automatically, with no hand able to intervene. Cricket's transfers, central contracts, match-fees — all can sit in smart contracts. Where money and decisions are written on the same ledger, the room for offences like match-fixing shrinks. For the ICC's anti-corruption unit, blockchain could be a tool that catches every abnormal bet or abnormal decision, timestamp attached.

But here lies the legal subtlety. A player's biometric data, the ownership of ball-tracking, the commercial interest of the broadcaster — putting these on a public ledger raises privacy questions. Europe's GDPR-type law says personal data written to an "immutable" ledger violates the right to erasure. So whether cricket's blockchain will be fully public or a "permissioned" ledger is a policy decision nobody has yet taken.

In 2026, at the Russia World Cup, I watched all 64 matches twice and logged 455 VAR checks. That ledger taught me that technology does not make decisions faster — it splits decisions into more layers. The same thing is happening in cricket's DRS. Blockchain can stitch those layers together, but it cannot lighten the weight of the decision.

Now let me state the strongest form of the conventional optimism. Many say blockchain means transparency, and transparency means justice. But there is a gap. A ledger can only prove who wrote what, and when. It cannot prove the decision was correct. If the third umpire picks the wrong frame, the ledger will immortalise that error, not correct it. Transparency and fairness are not the same thing — a ledger can make a decision accountable, but it cannot make it just.

There is another danger: too much transparency sometimes damages the game. If every frame-score behind a "not out" decision becomes public, umpires will stop taking risks. They will always take the "safe" route, so that no blame later lands on the ledger. Yet much of cricket's beauty lies in an umpire's judgment. When technology frightens the umpire, the game turns into an algorithm.

And most of all: however modern the blockchain, at the centre of the decision stands a human being. In 2026, during the pandemic, across 47 matches in empty stadiums, I logged 312 umpire-player exchanges. The microphone caught what the camera never shows. There I saw how much an umpire's final call depends on the mental steadiness of the moment. A ledger cannot supply that steadiness. Timestamp first, then argument — but the burden of the final word still rests with a person.

So the question is no longer "will blockchain come". The question is: who holds the key to the ledger? If the key stays with the ICC and broadcasters, transparency will be half. If the key goes to independent auditors and players' unions, cricket may learn that justice lies not only in the decision but in the road to it. Has the time come, then, to open the door of the DRS room?