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To know about the Umpires Call, first, you need to know about LBW. If the batsmen use his leg to stop the oncoming ball hit the stumps behind him, it's declared as OUT by the onfield Umpire stating Leg Before Wicket as the reason.
The ball hitting the leg pads need to be in line with the wickets and the batsmen should miss hitting the ball before touching the pads, then only the umpire will state his decision as OUT.
These decisions can be wrong sometimes due to the error of the umpires in the international matches. So, the International Cricket Council, the apex body which sees and makes cricket rules, introduced a Decision Review system.
In this system, a captain of the team can challenge the decision taken by the on-field umpire. A player can challenge a limited number of times in a match or in an innings depending on the format.
How DRS works in Cricket?
For an LBW appeal, when a captain signals for a third umpire by making a T shaped gesture using his hands, the on-field umpire makes a rectangle or TV shaped gesture asking for a DRS.
Then, the Third umpire checks for the ball legality, and then, checks if the bat touches the ball before hitting the batsmen pads. If there is no bat involved then, he/she checks for the line.
If the ball is in line, then he uses ball tracking to check whether the ball is hitting the wickets by plotting the ball's trajectory and angle using the software.
With the help of the high-speed cameras placed on the ground pointing at the batsman from four directions. The software interpolates the path from the point of hitting on pads to the wickets behind the batsmen.
If more than 50% of the ball is hitting any part of the wicket, the TV umpire will give the decision as out. If not, the final decision will be the ground umpires decision, which is known as umpires call. If the decision is umpires call, the review is not struck from the limited number.
Change in Rules
After backlash from the players, the ICC has made a few rules back in 2016 by increasing the wicket zone from inside of the leg and off-stump to outside of the leg and off-stump. Now, this wicket zone has increased from the bottom of the bails to the top of the bails.
Even now the ball has to hit more than 50% to change the decision made by the on-field umpire.