India 166, England 178, England loose ?

How is this possible.

I wont try to decrypt the merits of the Duckworth-Lewis system but in cases like this it’s a bit of a farce.

The gist of the whole system is about the ‘resources’ available to the team batting second. Which basically are the overs the team faces and the number of wickets in hand.

After an initial target is set when the chase begins, as the team starts to loose wickets and start running out of overs, the target is adjusted based on variables that no living human except Duckworth and Lewis understands.

What gets my goat is that after the first team has batted and the second team is set a target, there comes a point when the total needed is greater than the first teams score.

Of course the argument is that India were batting with a mindset of playing 50 overs. Had they known in advance it was going to be a 22 over slog fest they may have gone after the bowling more.

In the end these are all speculations. Cricket is a simple game which has been over complicated by too many rules and by laws.

The opposition having to score more than the other team to win a game is defeats all logic. Its not Englands fault that it rained and the game was curtailed.

How can anyone understand cricket when you have games like this. A team scores an x amount of runs and the other team scores more than the x amount of runs but still looses.

God help the yanks trying to figure that one out.

Overall I like the Duckworth-Lewis system, I think its fair way of gauging the targets.

But I also think there has to be threshold when calculating the runs needed, it should not exceed the total of the opposition. Whenever the total is readjusted it should never be greater than the initial total of the team that batted first otherwise it just ends up in a comical farce.

Maybe this is one non-variable that can be added into the whole equation.

Duckworth Lewis is not perfect and we should all challenge the system when things like this happen, in the least so that the yanks understand us.

15 Comments

  1. Thushal said:

    agreed. there has to be some sort of organizing going on… on the spot. if they know its raining, atleast reduce the overs to make it fair and square for both sides.

    November 23, 2008
    Reply
  2. Sachintha said:

    This is absurd, to be honest.

    November 23, 2008
    Reply
  3. David Barry said:

    I strongly disagree. Of course India would have tried to score faster if they knew that they’d only have 22 overs.

    Consider the following scenario. Team A scores 0/100 after 20 overs when rain hits. Their innings ends, Team B’s innings is reduced to 20 overs, and they manage to score 9/101 from 20 overs.

    Surely you would agree that Team A has performed better than Team B.

    November 23, 2008
    Reply
  4. damiths said:

    SP> I agree its consistent, I think DL is good but its not without its flaws.

    David> I agree with you on this. But is it fair that Team B has to score more than Team A ? To me that makes no sense at all.

    Why should Team B be asked to score more it is not their fault the game curtailed.

    I know you are good with stats, perhaps you have a better proposal ?

    November 23, 2008
    Reply
  5. achettup said:

    I agree with David Barry. I have to look at the tables myself because I’m puzzled how the revised target was so high after India used 15 powerplay overs, or 75% of their total allocation of powerplays. It does seem unfair that England got to face just 8 powerplay overs, an over more than half the total faced. Another thing that puzzles me is whether the batting powerplay is given more weight in terms of resources for the batting side. Of course, I’m not even sure if powerplays are treated as resources.

    November 24, 2008
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  6. David Barry said:

    If you have the same number of overs, either you increase the target or you make it harder to score the same number of runs in some other way. Increasing the target makes a lot of sense to me. The only other option I can see is reducing the number of wickets available (so, eg, the team batting second would start at three wickets down). To get finer adjustments you could both reduce the number of wickets available and reduce the number of runs a bit.

    But I would rather just increase the target.

    November 24, 2008
    Reply
  7. paavan said:

    Hello friends, I have posted here before and i am posting again.

    Good India won the series go India go

    D/L is sometimes irritating. I agree, my sympathy goes to English men and women who are heart broken, I’d like to be with you but I can’t as i’m Indian.

    But about D/L i think it should be reconsidered and purified ( my name = purifying lotus as well ) sometimes the outcomes because of D/L are outrageous….

    Thank You

    November 24, 2008
    Reply
  8. scorpicity said:

    At the moment there is nothind better than the D/L. The ICL uses another system developed by an India whose name I forgot.

    As along as it is consistent, it is ok.

    November 24, 2008
    Reply
  9. ©hinaman said:

    @ damiths –
    arithmetic makes it seem very harsh but there is a fairness to the D-L method –
    for it also compensates (through a statistical methods) for the difference in approach / strategy to pacing their innings that the team batting second would advantage.

    Say before the stoppage the team batting first may have been pacing their innings in the expectation of full 50 overs and would not have taken the risks of scoring as fast as they would have done had they known their innings was to be shortened. The team batting second know from the start of their innings that they have the reduced number of overs and can pace their entire innings accordingly.

    How accurate it is, I do not know – I never could understand statistics – but D-L is accepted as the best method we have.

    @ scorpicity,
    thats the jayadevan system

    November 24, 2008
    Reply
  10. Megha said:

    @damiths

    agree with David and chinaman. It is not fair that one team plays with the expectation that it has 50 overs to score runs and hence takes less risks and the other one knows that it needs to play just 20 overs with all 10 wickets in hand. Isn’t there is a difference in strategy when playing an ODI as opposed to a T20? D/L has its quirks but I think it works well in most conditions.

    November 24, 2008
    Reply
  11. damiths said:

    David> I like the idea of limiting the number of wickets a team has more than increasing the runs. Which are basically a figure plucked out of the air which belongs to no one.

    Whatever variables being used to increase the runs can probably be used to come with the number of wickets the team has. Which would be a constant and teams would not have to worry each time a wicket goes down about the total they have to chase increasing

    November 24, 2008
    Reply
  12. damiths said:

    atchettup, China, Scorpi, megha and paavan> I agree with you guys, I think its good that the DL accounts for the mind set of the team batting first because they will be thinking they have the full 50 overs available to them.

    But I think rather than increasing the total that needs to be chased we can look at other ways of making the game fair.

    Keep the total the same, and tweak other areas. Like the number of wickets available to you at the start.

    Rather than England chasing 178. They chase 167 but with only 7 wickets or something like that.

    November 24, 2008
    Reply

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