There will be no technology available for the Decision Review System or DRS in this year’s edition of the Bangladesh Premier League (BPL), a member of the event's governing council revealed Friday.

Due to the Covid-19 situation around the globe, the teams who run DRS will not be available to travel to Bangladesh for BPL, according to Ismail Haider Mallick, the member secretary of the current BPL governing council.

DRS is used in every major event organized by the International Cricket Council. Every major T20 league also uses this technology to further eliminate the element of human error in umpiring decisions.

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“The technicians are not willing to travel to Bangladesh due to the Covid-19 situation,” Ismail told the media. “They are the only teams to operate DRS, and they are busy working somewhere else. We are also not sure whether DRS will be available for the home series against Afghanistan.”

Besides DRS, this year’s BPL may also not feature any international umpires, while the coverage too may have to do without any foreign faces. Though Ismail has said they are trying to bring umpires from Sri Lanka or India, he was unsure about their availability.

In that case, the onus will be on local umpires and commentators to fill those roles, which they can - but there are no local teams to run DRS.  In recent years the use of the technology has become so integral to the game that it is hard to imagine any top-level cricket in this day and age without DRS.

Not only does it diminish the weight of the domestic franchise league by reintroducing the greater chance of human error, it also robs the game of the dramatic intervals that especially close DRS decisions have added to cricket.

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This year’s BPL is all set to begin on January 21 in Dhaka. A total of six teams will compete in this year's event, which is rebranded as Bangabandhu BPL for a second successive year, to celebrate the birth centenary of Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman.

Matches will be played in three different venues across Dhaka, Chattogram and Sylhet.