hopinet

Cricket or a lottery

17th June 2009

So currently the World twenty20 is on, as of writing they’ve just about got to the semi finals stage. England have been knocked out and I have to admit my interest has some what wavered. There is no doubt that twenty20 is an exciting form of cricket, however I have some reservations about it as a form of cricket and I still prefer the 1-day form of cricket as the short version of the game.

I feel that twenty20 is too favoured towards the batsman, the bowlers have it fairly hard. They aren’t allowed any degree of error, everything except those that are bowled dead straight seemed to be called a wide. I have no problem with some restrictions otherwise people would bowl unhitable balls all the time I just feel the current rules of what is being called a wide by some umpires is just a little unfair on the bowlers. My second concern is because the innings length I just feel it is so short it sometimes can be a little bit of a lottery as to whether you win or lose. One rubbish over by either batsman or bowler and it just affects the game too much, it may just be me but cricket is a tactical game, you need to build pressure on players, work out where they are scoring, frustrate them, out maneuver them. I just feel twenty20 seems to be heading cricket in to more of a game of baseball, stand there, get a big bat and just slog it as hard as you can, you’ll either get 6 or out!

My final comment is about the Duckworth-Lewis rule and I maybe a little biased as it’s what got England knocked out – I may ramble on a bit here but hope you follow what I’m trying to stay. I didn’t feel that England deserved to get any further in the competition but I was a little annoyed how they got knocked out, even if a bad decision by Captain Paul Collingwood to bat first when there was rain around didn’t help!

Anyway, the Duckworth-Lewis rule, for those who don’t know, is the method that is used to calculate the score that is needed when a game is shortened due to rain. I’m going to use the England v West Indies result to show why I don’t think it works. The way they calculate the Duckworth-Lewis score is far too complicated to go into and involves diagrams and graphs (from what I’ve read!) but basically it takes into consideration Wickets and Runs, it tries to also take into account passed results and the fact that teams scoring rate increases towards the end of the Innings. However this is how I look at it (with no statistical backing what so ever!!! – so probably technical wrong).

In the England v West Indies game the result was ‘West Indies 82-5 (8.2 ovs) bt England 161-6 (20 ovs) by five wickets under D/L method’. Doing some calculates with runs first, West Indies would have scored 200 in total, an impressive total, to put this in context in this world cup there has been only one game that a team has scored over 200 (211 in fact) and one other has got close with 198, but these were strong teams against, with the greatest respect, lesser teams – South Africa v Scotland and New Zealand v Ireland.

The other way we could look at it is in wickets, West Indies lost 5 wickets in 8.2 so they would have lost over 12 wickets in 20 overs as they don’t have that many players they would be all out in 16.4 overs. This actually gives West Indies a score of 164, still a win, but only just. I do have a another couple of ‘howevers’ that I think come into play and affect the result and I’ll leave you with a couple of thoughts. England got it wrong and should have just defended runs and not worried about wickets (no denying that) but ‘do lower order batsman score as fast as top order?’, ‘would the West Indies have been able to throw their bats at as many balls if they would have had to keep their wickets for 20 overs?’, ‘Is less than half the amount of overs long enough to get a realistic result?’