Kevin Pietersen - the man who dominated both Shane Warne and Muttiah Muralitharan early in his career - has quite explicitly blamed the DRS for changing the way he played spin bowling. Andy Bull writes in the Guardian's Spin blog that Pietersen's batting isn't the only thing that has changed since the advent of the DRS.

During Pakistan's series victory over England it felt as though there was hardly a single facet of Test match cricket that had not been changed, one way or another, by the DRS; batting technique, bowling technique, the balance between bat and ball, the decision-making processes of the umpires and the experience of the spectators in the ground, all had been altered.

On the first day of the third Test, for instance, as well as 16 wickets there were eight referrals, seven of them for LBW appeals. The nuanced rhythm of the day's play, which should allow for languorous contemplation as well as demanding rapt attention, was disrupted. The narrative was reduced to a series of DRS talking points.

Former Australia bowler Stuart MacGill, writing in the Age, says the DRS isn't 100% accurate and it doesn't have to be, however the call for a referral should be left to the umpire.

First, you can't blame the BCCI for not using the DRS. The ICC decided to allow its members to make a choice and they did. They know decisions will go for and against them. Second, despite the fact that Aleem Dar, one of the best umpires in the world, has called for the DRS to be uniformly adopted in all international series, I have a major problem with it. I have always been told that the umpire's decision is final. If we're going to use the DRS it has to be the umpire's decision to refer it upstairs or we shouldn't use it at all.

The MCG Test had enough incidents to suggest that supporting or opposing DRS is far from a black-and-white decision. Greg Baum of the Age writes that India's rejection of the system is stubborn, even contrary, but it is not without justification.

In a short time, the DRS has come to be accepted as infallible. This fits a tendency in all walks of life to devolve responsibility, if possible, to inanimate devices. Fans dwell on it. For players, to walk or not to walk is no longer an ethical issue; the technology will decide. Umpires yield to technology, just to be safe. Two of the effects of the DRS are to show that umpires mostly are right and, at the same time, to shake their confidence.

India's reluctance to accept the Decision Review System is regrettable writes Peter Roebuck in the Hindu. The BCCI wants to wait till the technology has been rendered foolproof. But humanity cannot wait upon perfection or else we'd all still be in caves.

The wrong question has been asked. The issue is not whether the systems are 100 per cent reliable but whether better verdicts are reached. To my mind, more appeals are answered correctly than ever before. Of course, the new ways are not perfect — players will find loopholes, third umpires will err — but let's get on with it.

India's intransigence to the UDRS is likely to prove self-defeating against England's Graeme Swann later this summer, says Mike Selvey, writing in the Guardian.

None of this will please England, and maybe Dhoni, shrewdly in his mind, sees it that way, for one player beyond all has reaped most consistent benefit from it – Graeme Swann ... Swann gorges himself on the readiness of umpires to give lbws where once they were reluctant. Tracking has changed their perception of what is permissible. Almost 30% of 138 wickets have come from lbw. With left-handers alone it is beyond that.

Here is the rub, though. Umpires will still give Swann his lbws because that is how they think. But Dhoni's intransigence on this matter means that his team will have no recourse to challenge that. It is something he might regret.

Sanjay Manjrekar, writing in Outlook India, finds it amazing that umpiring errors get talked about and debated over in the Indian media quite so much. Are umpires the favourite whipping boys of cricket, because such debates make for good TRPs, and unlike the players, they have no way of getting back at the media he asks.

Excessive criticism of any Indian cricketer can be quite hazardous for a media outlet … no more will it get exclusive quotes and interviews from the star cricketer that media outlets thrive upon. The cricketer, therefore, has great powers to fight back when in trouble. By comparison, the poor umpire is powerless! No one wants a Billy Doctrove exclusive, right?

For me, nothing is more ridiculous than the suggestion that an umpiring decision cost a team the match. We go on for days about how that one umpiring decision—for or against one batsman—cost us the game. You’d think that only one batsman bats in this game and not eleven.

Duncan Fletcher, writing in the Guardian, says that needless adjustments to the Decision Review System have only confused players and fans, and could lead to system's downfall.

The ICC [previously] came up with a system where the third umpire could only answer the question put to him by the on-field umpire. I remember one lbw decision where Steve Bucknor decided to ask the third umpire, David Orchard, whether the ball would have gone on to hit the stumps. Orchard agreed that it would have, but pointed out that the batsman had also got an inside edge on the ball. But because that was not what Bucknor had asked him about, the lbw decision was upheld. That was a good example of how stupid some of the thinking has been, and continues to be.

If the ball is going to hit the stumps and it falls within the laws, you are out. It is as simple as that … This 2.5m guideline is designed to allow for the inaccuracies in the Hawk-Eye system. By trying to allow for that smaller margin of error it [the ICC] is jeopardising the entire UDRS system by fuelling the BCCI's argument that the technology cannot be trusted.

The ICC’s Decision Review System has come in for some stick in the 2011 World Cup, particularly for one of the more complicated rules governing its use – the 2.5m rule. In an opinion column in the Hindu, Mukul Mudgal a former Chief Justice of the Punjab and Haryana High Court, says that there are other ambiguities in the system that could do with some clarity as well.

Rule 3.2 (b) lays down that the demand for a review has to be made by the captain of the fielding team or the batsman involved in the incident within a few seconds. What has not been laid down with clarity is what these few seconds could mean; this could be interpreted as mere 5 seconds or 50 seconds.

An editorial in the New Zealand Herald questions the absence of the UDRS in the ongoing New Zealand-Pakistan Test series and states that India's reluctance to use the UDRS will affect it at some stage.

Unfortunately, India, the power-broker of the modern game, was far less canny in its one attempt at using the system, in a series in Sri Lanka in 2008. All but one of its referral attempts in three tests failed. The Sri Lankans won 11 of their referrals. But rather than learn from this, the Indians have chosen to oppose the system, thereby placing it in limbo