Cow Corner Blog

No fooling Duckworth nor Lewis

Mon Jun 15 09:56PM

Their narrow defeat to the West Indies in the World Twenty20 crunch match means England have now failed to make the semi-final of six consecutive World Cups, be it the 50 over, 20 over or in this case, the nine over version.

But the home supporters walking out of The Oval bemoaning the thunderstorm and the subsequent apparent simplicity of the reduced target would be barking up the wrong tree.

Chasing 80 in nine overs may seem like a walk in the park but the Duckworth Lewis method for revised targets is one of science.

Created by Frank Duckworth and Tony Lewis (not the bloke who used to present the TV coverage from the BBC), originating from an undergraduate final-year project at the University of the West of England, it can produce results that are somewhat counterintuitive.

But it's certainly far better than any previous system. The Oval is not too far from Southfields, London's South African enclave, where they will remind you of the 1993 World Cup semi-final when their target to beat England in Sydney went from 22 off 13 balls to 22 off one ball under that particular system.

Instead of blaming D/L, look no further than your own batting - any side that fails to score a boundary for 40 minutes and 56 balls in a Twenty20 match has no right to be in a T20 semi-final.

A total of 160 was at least 15 runs below par and that's why WI were only chasing 80 from nine.

It was hailed a brave selection to leave out Dimitri Mascarenhas and play the extra bowler but given the evidence of the previous four matches it was foolhardy.

Dimi might have failed to find the boundary regularly against India but it left England with just one power player in their XI, Kevin Pietersen.

It's very well Ravi Bopara making a relatively sedate fifty (if he had faced every ball of the innings scoring at that rate England would have scored 140) if he has players around him who could swing the willow effectively.

But as David Lloyd so elegantly put it their rest of the middle order ‘av bats that sound like planks'.

Yet again the middle order played overs 12-16 like a 50 over game. There have may be thunder and lightning around the ground but the only electricity inside the stadium came when Stuart Broad managed to biff the last two balls.

But did the selectors have much choice? Do England simply not produce swashbuckling dynamic batsmen?

It is very easy to be Captain Hindsight after the event but once Andrew Flintoff had been ruled out, the hosts were desperately short of the old fashioned blacksmith approach.

Owais Shah and Rob Key offer as little as in the field as Samit Patel who, despite being what to bleep tests what Kim Jong-il is to international diplomacy, is one of the cleanest hitters in county cricket.

And would a new slimline Ian Blackwell bowling Roelof van der Merwe type left-arm darts and hitting it a country mile been a better option than a raw Adil Rashid?

While those two men are borderline selections that you could argue either way, there is one player currently playing county cricket few would argue could have made all the difference.

If only for a healthy Marcus Trescothick.

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