The Two Minutes of a Review: The Time Nobody Writes Down in Women's Cricket

In Sharjah that afternoon the loudest sound in the ground lasted one second. A bouncer, an edge, the wicketkeeper's gloves, then the bowler's arm going up toward the third umpire. The noise stopped. Five seconds, ten, twenty. The word review burning on the big screen, and eleven men standing in the field waiting on a decision that is not in their hands. I went quiet on air, because silence was truer than any sentence I could have spoken. Back at the desk I wrote two lines in the notebook. One: the ball was over in two seconds. Two: the smile took one minute and forty seconds to come back. The scorecard only records the first line.

I have checked that arithmetic many times as a commentator. A review does not only change a decision; it erases a piece of the match. While the third umpire works frame by frame, the bowler loses the breath of his run-up, the slip fielder straightens his knees, the wicketkeeper sets the gloves down. A set batter stands beside the crease and measures the pitch again, work he had already finished two overs earlier. Breaks are natural in cricket. In a drinks break a side arranges its plans, somebody is talking. During a review interval nobody does anything.

Reviews entered international cricket in July 2026, in the Test between India and Sri Lanka at the Sinhalese Sports Club in Colombo. Seventeen years have passed since. The framework now runs like this: in limited-overs cricket each team has two reviews per innings, and a successful review is not returned; in Tests a successful review is retained. In 2026 the ICC abolished the soft signal, and a player must raise the request within fifteen seconds of the ball going dead. The rules are strict. Still, the hand of the man standing in the middle trembles once before it goes up, because raising it burns one of two for good.

In women's cricket that calculation is tighter. Every ICC Women's Championship match carries points, World Cup tickets hang on them, and squad depth is not as broad as in the men's game. On October 20, 2026, at the Women's T20 World Cup final in Dubai, New Zealand beat South Africa by 32 runs. Through that tournament it was visible again and again: under real pressure, sides hoard their reviews and only raise a hand late. So the question is not whether the technology is good. The question is who pays for the time the technology spends.

The true cost of a review is not a wrong decision; it is a bowling side losing its rhythm. A bowler gets four overs in a T20 innings. Spinners usually bowl in pairs. One builds pressure across six balls, the next one holds that pressure. When a two-minute pause lands exactly on that hinge, the pressure survives on paper and dies on grass. Rewatching matches, I keep noticing the same thing: the ball after a review is often too short, or it drifts outside the line. That is not a skill gap; a body needs time to find its tempo again.

The time does not only disappear into a screen; the burden moves too. The third umpire now has to weigh multiple camera angles, UltraEdge and ball tracking together. Once the soft signal is gone, he has no safe fallback, and the call is his alone. That is right for accountability and expensive for time. A viewer outside can read the outcome in two seconds. The thirteen people inside the ground need two minutes. That gap is the one the cameras never show.

What the pause hands to the batter is never counted. A number six in women's T20 cricket may face twelve or fifteen balls in a match. In those two minutes she maps the next over in her head, which bowler to attack, which side of the field to hit into. In the same two minutes the bowler forgets exactly where the previous ball pitched. Pressure slides out of one body and into another head, and that transfer has no statistic attached to it.

One more thing I see regularly in women's league matches: captains use review time like a timeout. In competitions with no strategic timeout, those two minutes become an informal one, for the fielding side to talk and reset the field. It is clever and it breaks no law. But the match pays the bill in rhythm.

The common line is that technology has made the game easier. The other side deserves a look. Because two limited-overs reviews are not replenished, sides have become stingy. The clear errors get challenged early, and the fine errors of the last over do not, because raising a hand would leave the rest of the innings review-less. The claim that the rate of correct decisions has risen is true. It is not equally true in every part of the game. Successful reviews on fine catches behind the stumps are relatively rare, and what fills my notebook more often is the on-field politics of whether to review at all.

In football a VAR check after a goal brings two minutes of silence in which the celebration itself goes cold. Cricket's review is no different; the instant joy of a wicket has to be left at the screen. I wrote his name in the margin before the world learned to spell it. Marufa Akter's name. Shreyanka Patil's name. Nobody can take that ownership out of my notebook. But I also need it noted who is delaying the clock in their matches.

In the next women's ODI series I want to count one thing. From the sixteenth over of the first innings, how many seconds pass between the ball going dead and the captain's hand going up. If the average crosses twenty seconds, then the rhythm no longer belongs to anyone on the field, it belongs to the screen. Cricket then cannot take its own time back. — A commentator