Vohra's view: Duckworth–Lewis method in T20 cricket is not needed

Bikram Vohra 16:00 24/03/2016
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  • Unwarranted ceremony before India-Pak and Sri Lanka celebrate at South Africa’s expense.

    You couldn’t have got a ticket for love, money or corruption to the much vaunted Indo-Pak tie last week at the famous Eden Gardens in Kolkata. Even the rain came to the party and the decision was taken to lop off two overs from each side to compensate for the delay in the start. At a lethargic estimate that is about 20 minutes of play.

    Surely, there is nothing so sacrosanct that you cannot reduce the waffle time in the pre-start period and then in the prize distribution and the innumerable chats and inspections. In this instance there was a major ceremony with celebs singing the national anthems. So why not cut all that out and just complete the full quota of 20 overs instead.

    One can understand the need to whittle a match if a huge chunk of time is eaten up but twenty minutes at best and only an hour’s delay is arbitrary and unfair.

    Much of it is because of TV slots and booked timings but I think they are making a holy grail out of this issue. We have rain at Wimbledon and the TV franchise sucks up the delay and still shows the matches as rescheduled. Rules are written to establish guidelines of conduct and fairplay not create a draconian diktat.

    Earlier in the day the Indian women’s cricket team lost to Pakistan by two runs after they were visited by Duckworth and Lewis. It could have been the other way and it is a terrible way to lose a match.

    The silliness over short delays (not forgetting the math, now only three bowlers can bowl four overs each and two only three, unless it rains a little more in which case we will review the equations, are you keeping count, Captain?).

    The heartburn and the heartbreak that D and L bring with them needs to be addressed especially in the T20 format where they just cannot hold water. Perhaps it just about becomes acceptable in the one dayers even though now umpires increasingly allow the game to drizzle on and only lift the bails when the rain pelts down.

    There was a time not so long ago when raindrops falling on their heads was enough to signal a stop.

    This right to decide when to stop is now so fluid (?) that the umpire could tilt the result with a few minutes lag.

    Doing away with D and L for T20s, today’s most popular format, makes sense. You are playing an international tournament, there are 60,000 fans in the stadium and pride and prestige are at stake, half a billion glued to TV sets and it is still okay to reflect a result in five overs… really, five overs is a match.

    If you cannot do 20, share the points under force majeure and live with it. There are far too many variables in this shortest form to make Duckworth and Lewis welcome guests. Imagine if it had rained again over the Eden Gardens.

    The result could have been entirely different.

    Recall 2010. The Windies scored 60 for 2 in six overs taking on England’s 195 for 5. No way can logic dictate a victory for the former based on this formula. The worst situation is when the team batting second knows that in the truncated ‘T Whatever’ they need to score a certain number of runs. Like a match where Zimbabwe facing the Lankans were asked to make only 44 runs in six overs facing a total of 173 for 7. They just fell short.

    If there is one team that is not likely to give Frank and Tony a visa it is South Africa. They have been at the bitter end of the D/L on four occasions against England, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and New Zealand.

    Against the Sri Lankans in 2003 they got the calculation wrong and Mark Boucher, thinking they had won, blocked Muttiah Muralitharan’s last ball instead of whacking it.

    It is a sobering thought that no other sport reduces its playing time. You don’t see a soccer umpire saying okay, we’ll play twenty minutes for the World Cup… or golfers told that the final round of the Masters has been reduced to three holes, hard cheese.

    So why cricket?

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