From Review Log to Ledger: How Close Is Cricket's Decision Chain to a Blockchain — and Where It Stops Being One

Row 41 in the log.

December 2026, Rajshahi. An old television in the canteen of a coaching centre, my notebook beside it. On the ball-tracking screen, at frame 47, the ball brushed the outer edge of the stump; the projection said it would have hit, but in small print under the graphic: Umpire's Call. I stopped the watch. Appeal to signal: 87 seconds. The on-field decision stood, the review was retained, and a new row was added to my notebook.

That night I did not realise I was writing a ledger for cricket. Every row carried a timestamp, an event type, a decision, and a record of whose authority prevailed over whose. By the end of December there were 41 rows. The spreadsheet was my first whistle.

But this is not a blockchain. It is a private ledger — one copy, one owner, and that owner was me.

Nine years later, sitting inside the 2026 transfer window, when I look at cricket's decision architecture and the blockchain conversation side by side, the real question turns out not to be about technology. It is about who holds the ledger.

Context: 2026 technology, a 2026 word, a 2026 tender

In July 2026, at Colombo's SSC ground, the Decision Review System entered international cricket through an India–Sri Lanka Test. The opponent then was mainly the commentator's slow-motion replay. Sixteen years on, a decision in a Test match now passes through five layers — the on-field umpire, the player's review, the third umpire, ball-tracking or audio technology, and finally the broadcast graphic. Only the last layer is seen by millions.

The rule looks simple. Two reviews per innings in Tests and ODIs, two in T20Is; retained if successful, lost if not. The subtlety hides in how ball-tracking projection relates to the umpire's call. If the ball hits the stumps but less than half of it intersects the wood — if it only clips — then however emphatic the projection, the decision returns to the on-field call. This is umpire's call.

That single line has generated thousands of arguments. In my notes I never wrote "the umpire was wrong." I wrote: Law, frame 47, ball-tracking margin four millimetres inside the stump line, below threshold, on-field call stands. Evidence before argument.

The technology market is small — that is the real story. For ball-tracking there are essentially two approved providers, Hawk-Eye (acquired by Sony in 2026) and New Zealand-based Virtual Eye, plus UltraEdge and HotSpot as separate audio and infrared licences held by different broadcasters. One instrument, many copies — and not one of those copies ever reaches the public in raw form.

Money has now entered this market. Franchise cricket's auction, retention lists, trade windows, salary caps — all of it is a game of contracts and valuations. In the 2026 transfer window the biggest anxiety for teams is not buying players but balancing deferred franchise payments against central contracts. And this is exactly where some people have started saying: blockchain will make everything transparent. Salaries in smart contracts, tickets on-chain, fan tokens for ownership.

I am sceptical of these claims, but scepticism also has to be written down on time.

Core: five layers of a review, and where data leaks at each

Layer one — the appeal. A player raising a finger is a human decision. That second never enters any database. Nobody records who raised a hand first, who hesitated. In my notebook I called it the invisible layer. Across roughly two thousand matches of review logs, the gap between appeal and signal ran from 3 to 219 seconds — that gap is the real pressure gauge for match management, because in searing heat a long review means a bowler's rhythm breaking.

Layer two — the on-field call. The umpire's decision is not just a decision, it is a preset. DRS operates on a simple working rule here: when in doubt, the human on the field is the default. The system is announcing, in effect, that technology supplies evidence, not truth.

Layer three — the third umpire. What happens here the cricket world barely sees: the feed the broadcaster shows live and the monitors in front of the third umpire are frequently not the same thing. Different camera angles, different frame rates, different renders. My old habit with replays — freeze the frame, then decide. Because the frame I am seeing is selected, edited and cropped.

Layer four — the technology. Ball-tracking cameras sample at roughly 50 to 60 frames per second, while audio-based edge detection runs on a completely separate path — microphone spike first, picture second. Here is the problem: the ball-stump projection is a prediction, not a measurement. It is a probability model, and every model carries estimable error. Spin, air, pitch friction — how accurate those inputs are, nobody outside the system can independently verify. That is why every ball-tracking decision in my spreadsheet had a confidence column beside it, and for nine years the most frequent entry in it was "unknown."

Layer five — the broadcast graphic. This is the most damaging layer, because it is the only one the public accepts as truth. A static image of a ball-tracking projection, the word WICKETS on top, and in small print underneath, Umpire's Call. Most viewers never read the last line.

Across these five layers there is one copy of the data, and it is distributed — to the broadcaster, the board, the provider. The distribution is often competitive, sometimes contradictory. Whether any board holds the full third-umpire call log, I still cannot get an answer to.

The arithmetic of the threshold: umpire's call is a confidence interval, not a scandal

Before writing this in 2026 I ran the numbers. A stump is about 22.86 centimetres wide; a cricket ball about 7.2 centimetres in diameter. If ball-tracking shows the ball's centre near the inner edge of the stump, the overlap drops below roughly 50 per cent — and that is precisely when the system hands the decision back to the human.

This is not a conspiracy. It is a declared tolerance. Where the row carries two millimetres of uncertainty, the system says: in this zone I will not claim truth. Working on the umpiring side taught me that absence and uncertainty are different objects. The problem is that this declaration is never shown in a large font on replay. So the same decision leaves one group thinking the umpire got away with it and another thinking the technology did.

In 2026 I logged the World Cup from a hostel room, one frame at a time — thirty-one nights, four-hour sleep blocks. In that log I found no simple relationship between average review duration and overturn rate. Many assume a long review means a hard decision. My log says the opposite: a long review often means slow broadcast graphics, which is not a property of the decision itself.

A review log is a private ledger — and that is where the blockchain resemblance lives

Blockchain makes three core claims: immutability, timestamping, and decentralised verification. Cricket's review system already has the first two — what is recorded cannot be erased, and every event has a time. We are simply not used to recording that time to the millisecond, because nobody has pressured us to. Inside the system's own logs there are ball-tracking frame counts, injection times, projection points. None of it comes out.

The third claim is entirely absent. Cricket's decision ledger is centralised and ownerless in the wrong way. The technology has not carried cricket toward a blockchain; cricket lives in a half-blockchain state — a private chain with exactly three members: the ICC or the board, the broadcaster, and the technology provider. Any one of the three can change a row and the other two will not know.

This is where the post-2026 blockchain conversation becomes interesting. Late in 2026 the ICC announced its digital collectibles partnership, with a series called Crictos. The platform tried to align itself around international tournaments in 2026, promising fans on-chain ownership of international moments. By my notes the company behind it had raised a nine-figure funding round.

I am not against this — as a cricket fan I want fans holding a piece of the match. I just want to see the arithmetic. After the 2026–22 boom, global marketplace trading volume fell more than ninety per cent from its peak according to reports. Cricket's collectible series have followed the same rule: the value of a moment's digital token depends on audience size and platform mismatch, neither of which is written in the ledger.

Cricket's biggest blockchain is the auction, not the NFT

Here I want to say something extremely ordinary. Of all the digital trust products cricket has produced, the most transparent one is not a blockchain product at all — it is the auction. Every rupee bid at an IPL mega auction is broadcast live. Who was bought for how much, how much cap space remained, who was released at retention — the verification is essentially on stream. The information is shown at odd hours, but the full set can be reconciled by any fan in a spreadsheet.

Football's transfer market is the counterexample. There, "undisclosed fee" is the norm, annual accounts get revised later, and nobody can independently reconcile a world-record fee in an open ledger. Cricket, especially its franchise model, is far ahead — because its internal currency is not pounds or euros but board cap space, and every trade becomes a public number instead of a closed room.

My own experience: every trade season, when someone calls to ask where a player is going, I ask for two things first — a timestamp and a source. Everything else is an archive of rumour. Every transfer rumour needs a timestamp and a source.

A pattern shows up here. On 12 December 2026 at Mirpur, Chris Gayle made 146 not out off 69 balls with eighteen sixes. The natural transfer story that followed: one night's performance repriced the next season. But anyone who looks at the numbers knows that was an outlier, not a structure. Pricing an outlier as permanent value in a retention model is a serious error. That is the beauty of a ledger: one night's data is never erased, but it never becomes policy either.

Contrarian angle: rule versus emotion, and the thing even blockchain cannot fix

Let me concede something uncomfortable first. The faster the technology has become, the less cricket's trust has grown. Because the failure was never technological; it was verifiability. Many people here treat blockchain as a silver bullet — tickets, salaries, transactions all on-chain. But I ask: what will you do with what you see? If the hash of the raw ball-tracking frames sits on a chain while ownership stays with two private companies, does your confidence rise? The core condition of trust is ownership, and ownership is the one thing a chain cannot manufacture.

There is a larger problem too. The number of wrong decisions in cricket is neither rising nor falling — what is rising is the number of decisions. A modern match generates six to ten formal decision events: front-foot no-ball screening, injections, soft signals for catches (scrapped a few seasons ago), over rates, stop clocks. In December 2026 the ICC began trialling a stop clock between overs — sixty seconds, a five-run penalty for breach. The system has admitted that time is now a punishable asset.

And with that comes the unpopular part. Viewers do not want verification; viewers want a verdict. The phrase umpire's call is not justice to a fan, it is shelter. In rule terms it is immaculate; in emotional terms it is incomplete. I think a bridge has to be built between those two eyes, and there is exactly one move available: make the announcement clear before the resolution. What the technology decided, and where it stepped back, should be written in front of everyone during the match. Not long text — one line, in the same font size as the review request.

Going back through the record, one thought was born while cricket was played in empty stadiums in 2026. It may sound strange. I was building a library of three hundred clips from behind-closed-doors broadcasts — whistle tones, crowd-noise gaps, referee-mic bleed. The empty stadium taught me that silence has a data trail. What sounds like silence is not absence; it is another signal.

One more thing stays with me. Work had stopped and income was near zero. I wrote a plan at night — ninety days, three blocks a day, no exceptions. A 90-day plan is just a referee, because with a plan there is less argument, and with a plan there is something to stop the argument. By August I was logging decisions for free in resumed domestic leagues for the Bangladesh Football Federation's referees' committee, and since then I have felt that cricket's decision architecture needs exactly that kind of prior obligation written outside the box.

What cannot be recorded cannot be decided: trend, proposal, and one question

I know this is not a cheap fix, and changing the system costs money. But the industry never takes risk on its own, so what can be done is worth tracking. Cricket already records data on nearly every decision — scorecards, third-umpire logs, referee reports, stadium audio. What is possible is to publish a cryptographic hash of that log at the end of every match. Not the full data, not the meaning — just the hash. Then if someone changes it later, it can be proven. No fan needs a full system; a fingerprint is enough. An empty notebook is not the same as a blank stamp: what is empty and what exists but is kept from view are two different silences.

Looking ahead: over the next three years I believe two things will characterise cricket's use of technology. First, DRS-scale systems in newer and bigger platforms — the internet-based ball-tracking used for international league matches in the United States sent a clear message that this technology is no longer a museum piece and no longer geographically bounded. Second, over-time management. Stop clocks, pre-DRS statistics, latency in responding to moments — cricket committees now want an accounting of the match's invisible seconds. Because the history of decisions is now written in a ledger. My plea is that one copy of that ledger be shown to us, and one copy be sealed. The ledger of history should belong to everyone, not to a government, not to one franchise. It should belong to all of us.

I will leave one question standing in the middle of the pitch, because the answer is not in my log. You watched a ball — I gave you a decision at frame 47, and then I watched the machine hand the decision back to a hundred-year-old habit. Now tell me: you want to verify, you want to replay, you want to challenge. But when truth is two copies and one signature, whose hand do you want holding the seal?