Why is it in the hands of the players then? The player has made a call on a decision that is so line ball that it's not worth overturning. But the tech says it's 2mm (which is within margin of error) the other way and he gets a wicket or stays batting. That's unfair, which is what we're trying to get rid of, isn't it?
Because it's there to get rid of howlers. This has been said time and again. A "wrong" decision that is missing/hitting the stumps by a millimeter doesn't necessarily need to be overturned.
The best teams won before the DRS. Nothing really changes in the long run except it makes commentators and pedants feel better.
To be fair though they could speed up proceedings quite a lot... at the moment they're taking a good 3 minutes just to review whether or not the ball hits the bat in LBW calls, they could easily queue up hot spot + snicko + spin vision and have it all run at the same time to show that it hasn't hit the edge before going to ball tracking. That's my pet peeve about it, listening to the third umpire state "Obvious gap between bat and ball there, but lets go to hot spot just to make sure.... ok, no hot spot but bring up snicko for me and rock and roll it.... ok, it hasn't hit the bat, now lets go to ball tracking"
Not always though. I can remember quite a few series where umpiring controversies played a huge part. A few of the extreme whingers even threatened to go home as a result.
Statistical margin of error; the whole entire reason that they're not willing to trust DRS beyond a clear hit is because statistical margin of error indicates that a reasonable portion of deliveries that are projected to clip the stumps do not clip the stumps.
Once they removed the home umpires in tests, results become a lot more fair.
I've read that ball tracking takes a couple of minutes or more to come up, not instantaneous. But yeah they need to be flexible and skip snicko/hot spot if it's obvious on the slow mo and if ball tracking is ready.
A 1000% this.
Adding to this, what Steve said means every batsman gets the same decisions within acceptable margins regardless of umpire bias. We shouldn't really worry about millimeters worth of differences in appeals, when everyone gets the same system deciding on a dismissal, no one has reason to feel slighted. It would be pretty good to have it in place.
This is true, but did not solve the problem entirely
Yes, absolutely, many have said that before. The reviewing team should definitely not lose a review for an umpire's call decision.
I'm not saying I disagree with your statement, but do you have an argument to back it up with?
Isn't that what happens now? I believe if more than half of the ball is hitting, it overturns the umpire's decision of not out to out?
Which would mean they send every decision upstairs and waste a lot more time.
