The Review Room's Ledger: Can Blockchain Secure Cricket's Chain of Custody?

Last month a file landed on my desk, titled "Stage-2 Analysis." Inside were eight sections, every table, every cell — blank. Where cricket match data should have been, it said only: "insufficient information." I had sat down to watch a match, but there were no runs on the scoreboard, no wickets, no umpires. Just a ledger that came back empty-handed. This is not a match incident. It is a system incident. And that is exactly where cricket's biggest unspoken question hides — when we take a review, whose hands does that decision's data actually rest in? Who owns it? And if someone swaps that ledger out, who catches them? Cricket's review technology is only seventeen years old. DRS was first used in the July 2026 India-Sri Lanka Test. Then came Hawk-Eye ball-tracking, UltraEdge, Hot Spot. After the 2026 World Cup, the ICC made it permanent. Today, in almost every Test, the ball's path is measured to the millimetre. But this technology's chain of custody was never clearly defined. A review travels like this: the on-field umpire gives a decision, the player reviews, the third umpire watches a monitor, the broadcaster supplies the ball-tracking, the match referee writes a report, the ICC archives it. At every step, data changes hands. But the master copy of the ball-tracking data sits on the broadcasting company's servers — not the ICC's. This is where my problem begins. In Russia in 2026, I watched the screen become a second referee — 29 penalties, 17 overturned decisions, an average review time of 82 seconds. In football, VAR's data sits with FIFA. In cricket, it is split apart. A system that cannot hold its own data cannot prove its own decisions. That is where blockchain enters. I am no technology enthusiast — in my newsroom, I was the last to accept that video explainers were here to stay. But when I launched "The Discipline Ledger" in 2026, I understood: if every card, penalty and appeal sat on a timestamped, immutable ledger, no one could alter it midway. That season I logged 1,148 yellow cards, 39 reds and 14 successful appeals. Later it emerged that four clubs alone accounted for 31% of simulation bookings. No one could deny it, because the ledger existed. In cricket, blockchain could do precisely this. The three layers of every review — ball trajectory, edge audio, the moment of ball-pad-stump contact — if written to a distributed ledger, could never be erased once recorded. The broadcaster supplies the data; the game keeps ownership. Beside every third umpire's decision would sit its footage, its timestamp, its confidence level. Consider one review. Ball-tracking showed the ball passing outside the stump; UltraEdge showed no edge. The third umpire gave it out. Two minutes later, the argument began. The question: what percentage of prediction accuracy did the model carry? Where was that number stored? No one knew. With a blockchain ledger, every review's prediction-confidence, frame rate and camera angle would be timestamped. The argument would not stop, but its foundation would change. There is a second benefit no one says aloud: corruption. In match-fixing investigations, the biggest obstacle is unprovable evidence. If call records, betting transactions and review decisions were held on an immutable chain, the integrity unit's work would be far easier. I learned this when I started the page BDCricTeam in 2026 — fans accept a decision when you show them the ledger. The ICC's playing conditions spell out review procedure in detail — how many seconds, how many reviews, when they are lost. But data ownership, retention periods, or rules for handover to third parties are almost absent. That is the gap. A blockchain ledger could fill it, if the governing body runs its own node directly. But here is my caution. Blockchain does not turn a bad decision into a good one. A wrong review written to an immutable ledger stays wrong forever — worse, in fact, because it can no longer be erased. Technology does not remove the judge; it moves the judge's chair to another room. The umpire's eye sees the rule before the reaction; the ledger can witness that seeing, but cannot be the judge. Another point: cost and ownership. Who runs this system — the ICC, the broadcaster, or a sponsor? In cricket I have seen repeatedly that technology arrives inside a sponsorship package, not a purity pledge. Just as investment in women's cricket comes for ESG's sake, so it is with technology — institutions buy blockchain to protect their reputation, while no one owns the decision. My real objection is not moral but procedural. A blockchain ledger only means something when beside every review it records: who predicted, on which frame, with which camera, at what confidence, and who approved it. Protocol first, technology second. Otherwise we merely accelerate the argument, not the solution. Discipline, I learned, is a ledger, not a mood. My forecast is plain, and I am 80% confident: within three years at least one major cricket board will begin storing review data on a verifiable ledger — likely under pressure from an integrity investigation, not out of enthusiasm. I will be wrong if the ICC instead moves toward more secretive deals with broadcasters and blurs data ownership further. What I want is not blockchain — it is a clear chain of custody. A ledger that records every handover of every review, and that no one can unilaterally alter. I went back to the ledger, and the story changed. The only question now: whose hands will cricket leave its own decision-ledger in?