Explainer
Run out third umpire explained: how the call is made
What the third umpire actually looks for in a run out or stumping: the bail moment, the grounded bat, frame gaps, split screens and the benefit of the doubt.
By CricketTaken EditorialPublished Explainer18 min read
The keeper breaks the stumps, everybody in the ground looks at the big screen, and for the next forty seconds the match hangs on two questions that sound trivial and are not: at what instant did the bail leave the top of the stumps, and where was the bat at that instant. Run out third umpire explained properly is really an exercise in locating two events in time and comparing them, and almost everything that makes these decisions contentious comes from the fact that the pictures are not continuous.
Here is the short answer. The on-field umpire refers the appeal upstairs, which costs the fielding side nothing and is not a player review. The third umpire finds the frame in which the wicket was put down under Law 29, then looks at whether any part of the batter's person or bat was grounded behind the popping crease in that same frame under Law 30. If the evidence does not settle it, the batter is not out. Everything else, the split screen, the ultra-motion, the LED bails, the sequence the official works through, exists to make those two questions answerable from a set of still pictures.
- 2Laws that decide the outcome
- 2Moments that must be located in time
- 0Team reviews consumed by an umpire referral
- 1Bails that must come off for the wicket to be broken
Structural features of the referral, not match data.
Who sends it upstairs, and why nobody can stop them
A run out arrives at the television umpire by a route that has nothing to do with the players. The standing umpire, usually at square leg, decides he cannot separate the two events from where he is and draws the television signal. That is the whole procedure.
The fielding captain has no say in it. The batting side has no say in it either, and cannot decline. No allowance is spent, no card is played, and the same umpire can refer twenty of them in an innings without any consequence. The procedure that teams control, with its budget and its fifteen-second window, is a different animal entirely, and the player review system is worth reading separately for exactly that reason.
The distinction matters practically because it changes where the burden sits. In a player review there is an original decision on the field, and the technology has to prove that decision wrong. In an umpire referral for a run out there is no original decision at all. The standing umpire has declined to give one. So the third umpire is not overturning anything; he is deciding, from scratch, and the default when he cannot decide is the one the Laws have always used for an unproven dismissal.
The referral is also the only routine occasion in cricket where an official openly says he does not know. The signal for it is in the same family as the rest of the gestures umpires use to communicate with the scorers, and it is the only one that concedes something.
Law 29 in full, because the wicket is not down when you think it is
Most viewers believe the wicket is broken when the bail moves. It is not.
Law 29.1 sets the test: the wicket is broken when at least one bail is completely removed from the top of the stumps, or when one or more stumps is removed from the ground. Law 29.2.2 then closes the obvious loophole by stating that disturbing a bail, whether that disturbance is temporary or not, does not amount to complete removal. A bail can jump, rotate, rattle in its grooves and drop back, and the wicket has not been broken. The single exception is a bail that falls and lodges between two stumps, which is treated as complete removal even though it has not reached the ground.
Two further clauses come up more often than you would expect.
If one bail is already off, the remaining bail or a stump has to be removed. A fielder who knocks the empty end of the stumps has done nothing. And a fielder breaking the wicket with hand or arm must have the ball held in that hand, or in the hand of that arm. A glove thrown at the stumps, an elbow that clips them while the ball is in the other hand, a knee: none of it counts.
So the third umpire's first task is not to find the moment of impact. It is to find the first frame in which a bail is unambiguously clear of the stumps, and the difference between those two things is frequently the width of the whole decision.
LED bails, the light that fires early, and the wording competitions had to write
Lit bails were introduced to make that first frame easy to identify. They have made it easier and they have also introduced a category error that took several seasons to surface.
The light fires when a spigot loses electrical contact with its groove. Complete removal from the top of the stumps happens slightly after that, and sometimes it does not happen at all. A bail can lose contact for a few milliseconds, illuminate, and settle straight back where it started. On the Law as written, that is not a broken wicket, however emphatic the flash looks on television.
The problem became visible in the women's franchise game when a batch of bails proved sensitive enough to light on the slightest disturbance while both spigots stayed in their grooves. The competition amended its own playing conditions in response, defining the moment the wicket is put down as the first frame in which the lights illuminate, provided that subsequent frames show the bail permanently removed from the top of the stumps. That formulation is careful. It uses the light for its precision about when, and the following frames for the separate question of whether.
The same physical quirk produced a bowled appeal in a men's competition final that looked like a dismissal to everybody watching, because the light came on, and was correctly given not out, because the bail stayed put. Nothing in the Laws mentions lighting. A competition that wants the lights to have legal effect has to say so in its own conditions, and the ones that have not said so are still working from Law 29 alone.
Law 30, and what "making your ground" actually requires
The second moment is the batter's position, and Law 30.1.1 is the whole of the ordinary test: a batter is out of the ground unless some part of the person or bat is grounded behind the popping crease at that end.
Three words in that sentence do most of the work.
Grounded. In contact with the ground. A bat hovering two centimetres above the turf behind the line is worth nothing. Neither is a foot in the air over the crease, which is why a batter who runs through without dropping the bat and lands the foot late can be out despite appearing, on a single frozen picture, to be well home.
Behind. Behind the popping crease, and the crease is the back edge of the marked line. The painted line itself belongs to the area in front of it. A bat grounded on the paint is out.
Some part. Any part. A trailing hand, an elbow, a shoulder in a dive, the very toe of the bat. The third umpire is looking at the whole body and the whole bat, not just the obvious contact, which is why the useful angle is often not the one the crowd is watching.
The related discipline here is the one described in the piece on wicketkeeping: a keeper's whole technique for a stumping is built around making the removal happen in the window before any of those contacts is established.
The bat that bounces, and the clause written for it
The oldest injustice in the running game was the batter who dived, got the bat over the line, and had it kick up off the turf at the exact instant the bails came off. On a literal reading of Law 30.1.1 she was out of her ground, because nothing was grounded behind the crease in that frame.
Law 30.1.2 removes it. A batter is not considered out of the ground if, in running or diving towards the ground and beyond, and having grounded some part of the person or bat beyond the popping crease, there is subsequent loss of contact between the ground and any part of the person or bat, or between the bat and the person.
Read the qualifiers, because they carry the whole clause. The batter must be running or diving towards the ground and beyond. Having grounded the bat or a part of the person beyond the crease. Then, and only then, a later loss of contact is ignored.
What that protects is the completed act of getting home. What it does not protect is a batter who has arrived, stopped, and is standing in the crease when contact is broken, because she is no longer running or diving towards anything. Nor does it protect a batter who has never grounded anything beyond the line in the first place; the clause forgives losing contact, not failing to make it.
For the third umpire this converts a single-frame question into a sequence question. He is no longer asking where the bat was at the instant the bail came off. He is asking whether, at any earlier point in this run, the bat or the body was grounded beyond the crease while the batter was still travelling forwards. That is a much better question, and it is also a good deal harder to answer from pictures.
Frame rate, and the gap between two pictures
Now the physical constraint underneath all of it. Video is a sequence of still images, and whatever happens between two of them was never recorded.
A camera capturing a hundred pictures a second leaves a hundredth of a second unobserved between each pair. Objects keep moving during that interval. The bail keeps rising, the bat keeps travelling, and the third umpire is choosing between two frames that bracket the truth rather than looking at the truth itself.
The consequence is not that fast cameras are approximate. It is that the answer has a resolution, and the resolution is the gap between frames. If the bail is still seated in one picture and clearly gone in the next, the moment of complete removal lies somewhere between them, and every batter position inside that interval is consistent with the evidence. Where the bat crosses the line inside the same interval, no amount of zooming will separate the two, because there is nothing between the pictures to zoom into.
This is a different problem from the one ball tracking faces. That system has a whole flight path to fit a curve through, and its uncertainty is described in the article on how the ball-tracking system is built. A run out has no curve to fit. It has one instant, and either a camera happened to capture it or one did not.
Two practical points follow. The first is that the highest frame rate available should be the one used, which is why these decisions are made from ultra-motion cameras rather than the main broadcast feed. The second is that the useful camera is the one square to the crease, because a camera looking down the pitch cannot resolve the line at all.
Split screen, and why one picture with two clocks settles it
The split screen is not a graphic. It is the mechanism that makes the comparison possible at all.
The two events happen in two places. The bail is at the stumps. The bat is at the popping crease, more than a metre away and often obscured by the keeper's pads or a fielder's legs. No single camera holds both at a usable magnification.
So the truck builds a composite: the stumps in one half of the screen, the crease in the other, both frozen on the same timecode. The third umpire then advances both halves frame by frame together. When the bail reaches complete removal on the left, whatever the right half is showing is the batter's position at that instant, and the decision has been made.
Everything about the presentation follows from that. The line drawn across the crease is there because a human eye judging a boundary against a painted line at high magnification is unreliable. The freeze at the bail moment is there because the official is being asked to state, out loud, which frame he is using. The repeated back-and-forth that looks like indecision is usually the operator confirming that the two halves really are locked to the same clock, which is the one error that would invalidate the whole exercise.
- Was the delivery legalThe legality of the ball is settled first, because a no ball changes what the dismissal can be. A run out remains available off a no ball, but other outcomes do not.
- Was the wicket fairly put downThe ball, the bat, the batter's person, or a fielder's hand or arm with the ball held in it. A fielder who breaks the stumps without the ball in the relevant hand has done nothing.
- Find the frame of complete removalAdvance the stump camera until a bail is unambiguously clear of the top of the stumps, not merely disturbed. Where lit bails are in use, the illuminated frame is checked against later frames showing permanent removal.
- Lock the crease picture to that frameThe square-on view of the popping crease is aligned to the same timecode so both events are read from one clock rather than two.
- Look for any grounded contact behind the lineBat, foot, hand, elbow, any part of the person. The contact must be with the ground and behind the back edge of the painted line.
- Check the running exceptionIf nothing is grounded in that frame, look back through the run for a moment when the bat or person was grounded beyond the crease while the batter was still travelling forwards.
- Decide which batter is outIf the batters had not crossed, the one running towards the broken wicket is out. If they had, it is the other.
- Rule, or give the benefitA finding of out requires positive evidence that the batter was short. Anything the pictures leave open produces not out.
The order of the checks. A failure at any stage ends the enquiry, and an unresolved question at the last stage produces not out.
Stumpings are a different geometry, and a tighter one
A stumping asks the same two questions and asks them under harder conditions.
In a run out the batter is travelling towards the crease and is trying to get in. In a stumping she is travelling away from it and is trying to get back, usually having overbalanced, often with the front foot dragging rather than lifting. The dragged toe is the signature problem: it slides along the ground, crosses the line, lifts by a centimetre or two while momentum carries it forward, and lands again. Whether that lift coincides with the bail moment is a question of a very small number of frames.
The other difference is the keeper. In a run out the wicket is usually broken by a throw or by a hand arriving from a distance, and the stumps are visible. In a stumping the keeper's gloves, forearms and pads are directly in front of the wicket, and the bails often come off inside a cloud of glove. Finding a clean sight of complete removal can be genuinely impossible from some angles, and when it is, the batter survives.
The Law 30.1.2 exception applies here too, but it applies rarely, because a batter returning to the crease after a stumping attempt is not usually running or diving towards the ground and beyond. She is scrambling back to a line she has already crossed once. The clause was written for the run, not for the recovery.
The stumping referral is no longer a free look at the edge
For several seasons the stumping referral contained a loophole that fielding sides had learned to use.
Because the third umpire checking a stumping had to satisfy himself the batter had not hit the ball, the referral involved an edge check. So a keeper who suspected a nick but whose captain did not want to spend a review could simply take the bails off, appeal for the stumping, and let the on-field umpire send it upstairs. The edge would be examined, at no cost, without any review being risked.
An amendment closed it. A stumping referral is now confined to the stumping itself, assessed from the side-on pictures, and the caught-behind question is not part of it. A side that wants the edge examined has to take a player review, and pays for it in the ordinary way if it turns out there was nothing there.
The change is a good illustration of how these regulations evolve. Nothing about the technology altered. What altered was that a procedure designed for one purpose was being used to obtain something else for free, and the fix was to define the scope of the referral rather than to change what the cameras do.
Benefit of the doubt, and what conclusive means here
The phrase people use is benefit of the doubt. The phrase in the protocol is closer to conclusive evidence, and the two are not quite the same idea.
In a player review the technology has to prove the standing umpire wrong, and where it cannot, the original decision survives. In an umpire referral for a run out there is no original decision to survive, so the third umpire has to reach a positive finding either way. In practice this resolves the same direction, because a dismissal has to be established rather than assumed, and an unproven dismissal is not one. The batter continues.
That default is doing more work than it appears to. It means that every limitation described above, the frame gap, the obscured stumps, the ambiguous bail, the keeper's gloves, systematically favours the batting side. A fielding side that gets a marginal run out is being given something the system was not designed to hand it; a fielding side that loses one has run into the design working as intended.
It also explains the length of some referrals. An official who can see the answer in two frames does not need thirty seconds. An official taking a long time is usually working through the running exception, or checking a second angle for a contact he suspects exists but has not yet seen, and every second of that is spent trying to reach a positive finding rather than defaulting.
The soft signal, what it was, and why run outs never had one
The soft signal is regularly dragged into arguments about run outs, and it never applied to them.
It existed for catches. The standing umpire, before sending a disputed low catch upstairs, had to state what he thought had happened, and that stated opinion then stood unless the replays conclusively contradicted it. The mechanism produced a specific irritation: an umpire standing twenty metres away and looking through two fielders would give an opinion he had no real basis for, and because the replays of a low catch are almost never conclusive, his guess survived.
International cricket dropped it in 2023. The standing umpires now consult the television umpire without offering a prior view, and the third umpire decides on the pictures.
Run outs were never part of that arrangement, because the standing umpire refers them precisely on the basis that he has no view worth stating. There has never been a preliminary opinion for the replays to have to overcome. Anybody complaining that a third umpire has ignored the on-field official's soft signal on a run out is describing a procedure that does not exist.
The cases that are neither, and how they are handled
A few situations sit at the edges and produce most of the remaining arguments.
Both batters at the same end. The third umpire has to establish whether the batters had crossed at the instant the wicket was broken. If they had not, the batter running towards the end where the wicket went down is out. If they had, the other one is. The camera work here is a third question of position and time, and it is the reason a run out can be given against a batter standing calmly at the other end.
The ball deflecting off the bowler or a fielder. A run out remains a run out regardless of what the ball touched on its way, with one exception for a deliberate deflection by a fielder in some circumstances. Where the ball has struck the bowler's hand and gone on to the stumps, the only question is still the two moments.
The short run. The umpires may also be checking whether a batter failed to ground the bat behind the line while turning, which costs a run rather than a wicket, and it is signalled separately.
The non-striker leaving early. A run out at the bowler's end before delivery sits in the same Law as any other run out, and is judged by the same test of whether the batter was grounded behind the crease. The technology involved is identical; the argument around it is about etiquette rather than about pictures. The broader set of rules these sit inside is collected in the guide to the Laws worth actually knowing.
What the cameras miss, and why the angle matters more than the zoom
Every referral is limited by which cameras happened to be pointing at the right thing, and a broadcast is not built for officiating.
The square-on camera at the striker's end is the one that resolves the popping crease properly, because it looks along the line rather than across it. A camera set even slightly down the pitch introduces parallax: the bat appears to be behind the line from one side of it and in front from the other, and the error grows with the distance between the camera and the crease. That is why an official will discard a picture that looks sharp and revealing in favour of one that is duller but square.
Obstruction removes more decisions than resolution does. A keeper collecting a throw stands directly between the square camera and the base of the stumps. A bowler following through occupies the same space at the other end. A close fielder crossing the frame at the wrong moment blocks the bat for exactly the two or three frames that matter. None of this can be recovered by magnification, and it is the ordinary reason a referral that looked simple in real time takes forty seconds and ends not out.
There is also a coverage difference between competitions that nobody advertises. A series with a full camera complement, dedicated stump cameras at both ends and ultra-motion on the square gives the official several independent looks. A series produced on a smaller budget gives him two, and one of them may be blocked. The Law is identical in both cases; the proportion of referrals that can actually be resolved is not, and that gap is one of the quieter inequalities in international cricket.
Why these calls take longer than they used to, and what the delay buys
Referrals have got slower, and the reasons are worth separating, because two of them are good and one is not.
The first reason is that the questions have multiplied. An official in the early years of television replays checked one thing: bat behind line at bail moment. He now checks legality of the delivery, the fairness of how the wicket was put down, the exact frame of complete removal, the crease picture locked to it, the running exception across the preceding second of footage, and which batter is out. Each of those is a real question with a real answer, and skipping any of them produces wrong decisions rather than fast ones.
The second is that the evidence has multiplied. More cameras means more angles to work through before concluding that none of them settles it, and the conclusion that nothing settles it takes longer to reach than a conclusion that something does.
The third is the one that deserves criticism. Some of the delay is production rather than adjudication: the replay package is being assembled for the audience while the decision is being made, and the sequence the crowd sees is edited for tension rather than ordered for efficiency. That is a broadcasting choice dressed up as officiating, and it is the part of the wait that could be removed without costing a single correct decision.
Weighed against the alternative, the delay is cheap. The dismissals being examined here are decided by margins no human eye at square leg could ever have resolved, and before the referral existed those margins were settled by guesswork that fell, over a career, roughly evenly on both sides. Getting them right takes time. The honest complaint is not about the time; it is about the theatre wrapped around it.
How to read the replay while it is running
Four habits will tell you the outcome before the decision appears.
Watch the bail, not the impact. The ball hitting the stumps is not the moment. Look for the frame where a bail is genuinely clear of the wood, and start your own comparison from there rather than from the collision.
Check whether the bat is down. The single most common misreading in a crowd is treating a bat that is over the line as a bat that is home. If you cannot see it touching the turf, the third umpire cannot either.
Notice which camera they settle on. An official cycling through angles is looking for a square-on view with an unobstructed line. If he keeps returning to an angled camera, the good picture does not exist and the decision is drifting towards not out.
Count the frames between the two states. If the bail is seated in one picture and gone in the next while the bat crosses in the same interval, the evidence has run out. That is not the official hesitating. That is the answer.
The officials making these calls sit on a small international panel and are assessed on exactly this kind of decision, as described in the piece on how the elite umpiring panel works. More on the rules, the technology and the people applying them is gathered in the cricket section, and the full set of explainers lives on the blog.
Common questions
Does a run out review use up a team's DRS reviews?
No. A run out or a stumping is sent upstairs by the on-field umpire, not by a player, so no team's review allowance is touched and there is no limit on how often it happens. The fielding side cannot demand a referral and the batting side cannot refuse one. Player reviews are a separate procedure with a separate budget.
When exactly is the wicket considered broken?
Under Law 29 the wicket is broken when at least one bail is completely removed from the top of the stumps, or when one or more stumps is removed from the ground. A bail that is merely disturbed and settles back into its grooves has not been completely removed, so the wicket is not down. The one exception is a bail that lodges between two stumps as it falls, which counts as complete removal.
Why is a batter safe when the bat bounces after crossing the line?
Law 30.1.2 protects a batter who, while running or diving towards the ground and beyond, has grounded the bat or a part of the person beyond the popping crease and then loses that contact. Once the ground has been made in the act of running or diving, a subsequent bounce of the bat or a lifted foot does not put the batter out of the ground again. The protection applies to the run towards the crease, not to a batter who has stopped and is standing still.
What do the LED bails actually prove?
They show that a spigot has lost contact with its groove, which happens fractionally before the bail is completely removed from the top of the stumps. A bail can light up and still settle back, and in that case the wicket has not been broken. Competitions that use the lights write their own wording about how the lit frame and the removed bail combine, because the Law itself says nothing about lighting.
What happens if the replay is not conclusive?
The batter survives. For an umpire referral there is no original on-field decision to fall back on, so the third umpire has to be positively satisfied that the batter was out of the ground when the wicket was broken, and where the frames do not show it, the finding is not out. Uncertainty is resolved in the batter's favour by design.
Can the third umpire check for a nick during a stumping referral?
Not any more. The referral is confined to the stumping itself, using the side-on pictures, after an amendment aimed at stopping fielding sides from obtaining a free caught-behind check without spending a review. If a side wants the edge examined it has to take a player review, which costs it that review if it is wrong.
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