Two Minutes of Silence: How DRS Is Eating Cricket's Rhythm

Last night, from a balcony in Rangpur, I watched a T20 match. Sixteenth over, 58 needed from 34. The bowler released, the ball struck the pad, the umpire kept his finger down. Then the familiar sequence: the batter raised his arm for the T-signal, the screen flashed 'review', and the whole stadium went quiet. Ball-tracking finished, 'Umpire's Call' appeared, the batter walked back. Two minutes and seven seconds on the clock. In my notebook that stretch has a name: the empty two minutes. In 2026, at an empty Dhaka ground for the goalless Bashundhara Kings versus Sheikh Jamal match, I first understood that when the crowd leaves, the sound leaves too. Since then I record the gaps in a match — who is doing what, and who is doing nothing. DRS is cricket's largest gap, because the play stops there while the mind does not. DRS was born in July 2026, in the India-Sri Lanka Test at Colombo's SSC. At first it was an experiment, then a habit, and since 2026 it has been standard practice in almost every Test and limited-overs match. Two reviews per innings in Tests, one per innings in ODIs and T20Is. On LBW, the decision changes only if more than half the ball is projected to hit the stumps; below that, the on-field call survives as Umpire's Call. In 2026 the ICC removed the soft signal for catches, so the on-field umpire's initial guess no longer stands in the way of the decision above. The regular-season arithmetic attached to these rules gets far less attention. Over rates, penalty points, net run rate — under that pressure teams count every extra second. A review usually costs ninety to a hundred and twenty seconds. Four reviews in an innings means more than eight minutes, roughly six percent of a T20 innings. When the table gap is two points in the final weeks, those eight minutes carry real weight. The real question is not about time. It is about the decision. And who owns that decision has become unclear. From years of watching matches closely, one thing is clear to me: a review was never only a correction tool. It has become a tactical resource. Each side holds a limited number, and that resource is not worth the same across a match. In the powerplay a review has lower expected value, because wickets are rarer per ball and the long-term cost of a wrong call is smaller. From the seventeenth over to the twentieth, when every ball can turn a match, one review is worth several. The trouble is that a batter's emotion runs the other way. If someone takes one on the pad in the first six overs and believes the ball was missing, he reviews at once. The review that would have mattered in the last over is gone right there. Early in a season I have watched sides lose reviews that way — by emotion, not by strategy. The second thing that does not show up from outside is that the delay itself is a tactic. When a set batter is in rhythm, a review breaks that rhythm: the bowler rests, the field resets, the coach's message arrives. This is why many teams review on 'it might have been' rather than genuine conviction. A side with no reviews left stops asking. The decision has stopped being a matter of belief and become a matter of accounting. Who makes the call matters too. The wicketkeeper usually has the best view — a keeper like Mushfiqur Rahim is often first to raise a hand. But the bowler, right after delivery, carries the most emotion and the least reliable read. In modern franchise cricket an analyst in the dressing room watches ball-tracking on a laptop and sends a coded signal. That arrangement does not speed the decision; it adds a layer. An experienced all-rounder like Shakib Al Hasan often decides on his own, and even that decision is a blend of instinct and emotion. Third, the umpire's own manner of deciding has shifted. Once the finger went up and the question followed. Now the umpire often pauses a beat, knowing someone upstairs is watching. The pause is small; its effect on the rhythm of play is not. When I sit in the commentary box I note the details: how far the shoulder dropped, how late the finger rose, which foot the square-leg umpire weighted. Those micro-signals usually reveal how certain the decision really is. Fourth, where do the two minutes actually go? Ball-tracking takes seconds. The time goes to the broadcast director — which angle is shown first, how long the UltraEdge waveform takes to load, how quickly the third umpire and the TV director communicate. That process follows no fixed template, so the time follows none either. A visible hundred-and-twenty-second clock would solve much of it. Red-ball reviews have a different character. In a five-day match one review can bend the course of an innings, because wickets are scarce and consequences are long. In white-ball cricket a review works mostly as a momentum-breaker. One law, two uses, and the law book accounts for neither. Fifth, and least discussed: DRS is still a privilege. Many bilateral women's series and associate matches have fewer Hawk-Eye cameras, no ball-tracking, no reviews. A clear wrong decision there has no route to correction. When a batter like Nigar Sultana Joty is on the wrong end of one, she does not even have the option to ask. I wrote the names of many women cricketers in the margin long before the world learned to spell them; the technology on the field is still sitting in that margin. That technology has changed cricket is beyond doubt. In 2026, in the Radio Rangpur box for France against Argentina, when Kylian Mbappe scored twice, there was no VAR. Now a goal celebration in football is conditional too: watch first, celebrate after. Cricket has changed in exactly the same way. The first reaction to a wicket is no longer 'out' but 'out, pending review'. That conditionality has altered how spectators remember the game. The usual criticism is that technology is destroying the rhythm. My accounting runs differently: the rhythm is broken by the process, and at the centre of that process sits the transfer of authority away from the on-field umpire. As a commentator I have seen it many times — before raising the finger, the umpire glances upward. In that one second, the confidence of an entire stadium tilts. Consider this: if an umpire's decision is not final, the way he makes it will change too. That is what happened. This transfer of authority does not produce faster decisions; it produces hesitation. The two-minute limit is therefore a problem of responsibility, not of time. The second confusion is our assumption that fewer reviews mean less accuracy. Cutting Test reviews from two to one might leave a few errors uncorrected, but it would force teams to review only near-certain cases. An apparent restriction may actually hand the rhythm back. A third point gives me some discomfort, but it needs saying: under the present system, the cost of a wrong decision is often paid with a batter's career, while nobody pays for a technology error. Ball-tracking calibration, camera placement, software upgrade schedules — none of it appears in any transparent ledger. What I want to see next season is nothing complicated. A visible hundred-and-twenty-second clock on the big screen; a review umpire independent of the broadcast director; the same standard of ball-tracking at every venue; and mandatory extension of DRS to women's cricket and associate matches. The question stays open: if the decision does not arrive within two minutes, whose decision is it — the umpire's, the technology's, or the broadcaster's?