Holding's view, which he advocates consistently and eloquently, is that the "umpire's call" on lbws leaves the fielding side hoping that the umpire is temperamentally an "outer" and not a "not outer" (think, for example, Bird or Shepherd in the past as examples of the latter, compared with Ray Julian, the smiling assassin, as an example of the former). But that's how it's always been, and an umpire who repeatedly turns down decent appeals is unlikely to reach the top level and televised cricket anyway. DRS was introduced to eliminate the "shocker" decision (think those of B C Cooray in Sri Lanka in 2000) and succeeds in that aim so long as teams don't waste their reviews. But it also allows decisions to be made which could never have been made with the naked eye because the margins are too tight. "Umpires' call" is designed to allow for tiny possible margins of error in the technology. It's ironic that while this is probably the only aspect of DRS that still attracts criticism, in football there's talk of introducing exactly the same concept for "marginal" offsides under VAR. Unfortunately if you want to eliminate the obvious error, you have to deal with this kind of thing via protocols and the like which will always be matters for debate.
