Decoding the DRS: Quantifying the impact of umpire’s call
Through the course of the past year, many things have changed, not just in Cricket, but right throughout the world. In these testing times, am just as grateful for the resumption of live sport under proctored conditions, for there is no greater joy for an ardent follower of the game. DRS in cricket has been an intriguing thing for me right from the days it got introduced. With the debates around it increasing with every test match, I decided to study another set of patterns in addition to my work earlier.
TLDR of the previous work was about understanding teams success ratio in DRS, which batsman had the most success, how umpires fared in regard to overturned decisions, etc. The scope of that study was limited as the World Test Championship had just begun then.
About this study
I wanted to collect all possible review instances in test matches since 1st October 2017, because thats when the Umpire’s call started to not be counted towards a loss of review for the batting side. I am no Cricinfo or Cricbuzz when it comes to having access with vast amounts of Cricket data, but a little bit of data pipelining and scraping goes a long way in solving the issue.
Cricinfo match notes provide review information, which helps to deduce the batsman, umpire and the outcome of the review. UDRS event commentary text can be extracted neatly from Cricbuzz, and Cricsheet is an excellent source of updated ball by ball information, helping to identify the non striker and the bowler.
In all, 1241 review instances were collected across 115 tests. For each review event, a categorisation was made, along with primary and secondary roles involved in the event, as below.
I have reverse engineered this table, based on what I wanted to analyse. When a review by fielding team ends up being struck down as umpire’s call, I wanted to study who has benefitted the most as a batsman, and relatedly, which bowlers have lost out on the same.
Quick distribution of review events shows more than half have been ineffective, and about 1 in 5 review events were umpire’s call. The rest of this blog is about trying to quantify umpires call and seeing what is the impact on batting and fielding units.
Umpire’s Calls: Two coins of the same side
India have always tread the DRS territory on thin ice, and the recent clamour from the likes of Sachin to relook at Umpire’s call is backed up below.
India as a team, has been on the wrong end of umpire’s call for at least 36 times, which is easily the maximum amongst all teams, with 21 going against when they were bowling, and 15 of them when they were batting.
India (batsman reprieves) and Pakistan (batsman dismissed) lead the corresponding tallies at 21
Albeit Australia have not been impacted much while bowling due to Umpire’s Call, they are ahead of India when it comes to their batsman being dismissed due to Umpire’s call. It is not just the volume of instances that have gone against team India, but a breakdown of who was impacted adds weight to the rising noise.
80% of reviews with Kohli at the crease have ruled him out on Umpire’s Call
Despite having the most appeals against him, Ben Stokes has walked away unscathed 6 out of 7 times, whereas his team mate Butler and India skipper Kohli have not enjoyed the same mercy from the umpires.
Spotting this pattern for batsman, I extended it to the impact Umpire’s call is having on bowlers. As such, life has been hard for bowlers off late, but more so especially for Offies.
As a batsman, you’ll more or less be not out if the fielding team offie opts for a review, and the umpire is unmoved
The list of bowlers who have had very less luck with Umpire’s call probably needs to be analysed in depth, correlating other factors such as the bounce they are extracting off the pitch, and the surface on which they are bowling, etc. but a very top-of-off analysis (pun intended) reveals the below.
Maharaj, Ashwin and Dilruwan Perera lead a list of bowlers who have not had luck with the Umpire’s call going their way.
7 appeals out of as many for Ashwin have gone against him adding evidence on top of Kohli’s ill fated luck with umpires, as to why India have been arguing for a relook into the concept.
Beware an appeal from the likes of Bumrah, Starc, Lyon, Jaddu and Woakes, as they all carry a dismissal% on umpires call hovering over 80. Essentially this means although you would not be losing you a review as a batter, you’ll find yourself back in the hut.
Umpire’s Call: Who has made the most ‘incremental runs’?
In another way of quantifying the impact of umpires call, the incremental runs metric I show below, is the number of runs added by a player, after a particular review instance ended up being Umpire’s call in favour of the batsman, all the way to the completion of the batsman’s innings.
Simple illustration of incremental runs….
For e.g. if Williamson is batting on 47 off 69 balls at a particular instance (say over 25.3), and an umpire’s call goes in favour of him at Over 25.3, and eventually Williamson is dismissed/declares the innings when he is at102 off 231….
Then incremental run impact is 55 (102–47), and incremental ball impact is 162 (231–69).
The logic can handle multiple instances of umpires call or successful DRS reviews by the batsman, hence, the incremental runs concept will hold for the entire duration of the batsman’s innings.
In the 3rd test against SA, Stokes was batting on 2 off 9 against Maharaj’s appeal remained not out on umpires call. He went on to add 118 runs subsequently. The greater impact was his partnership of 203 with newcomer Ollie Pope, which ultimately turned the game. In this study, I have analysed only runs added by the striker, and not considered other impacts such as partnerships, incremental balls of crease occupation, etc.
Keeping a cut off of 50, we see Stokes has added 272 runs across the 6 instances he got a reprieve. At least 4 centuries were possible due to such reprieves, with Shan Masood adding 122 runs in a single innings being the highest of the list.
The Windies have borne the brunt of most incremental runs (551) scored by various batsmen against them, who wouldn’t have been there, if not for Umpire’s Call.
What’s coming up next?
Leaving alone umpires call, there are also instances when teams have failed to overturn decisions and there have been moments when review pairs have been smart to take the right review at the right time. While my previous blog and this Cricinfo article touched upon which teams/batsmen were most successful with reviews, I also want to see at a greater depth and answer a few questions below.
- Analysis of batsman who have added most incremental runs through the use of conventional DRS
- Which pairs at the crease have had the most success with overturning decisions?
- Analysis of a captain’s effectiveness in the usage of DRS while fielding
- Analysis of a fielding keeper’s effectiveness in helping overturn fielding reviews
- Analysis of bowlers who have convinced skippers to review more often than not, and their success rates
- Post the pandemic, teams have been 1 extra review per innings, to accommodate for bias, and bubble restrictions. Jason Holder’s comments recently make a case for a study whether neutral umpires need to enter bio-bubbles ASAP.
I have some work underway on the above, and hope to share the same in upcoming weeks.
This study is trying to test the waters, so please feel free to leave any inputs as feedback, so that I get more impetus and direction, on how to quantify this better.
Cheers,
Kishan
