20 February 2008

England won!

It appears that for a long time now, it's been possible to tie ODIs with the sides losing different numbers of wickets. At the risk of exposing my England bias, what happened to the old rules where the side who had lost less wickets won? This seems to me to be a sensible way of deciding a winner when it's clear that there's nothing between the sides. (Admittedly this assumes that people want to find a way of dividing the sides and want to create a "winner").

Yet wickets aren't used to decide the winner when teams have the same number of runs as they once were. So having given it a few seconds thought, I don't understand why most 1st innings don't end in a run-out - if wickets are worth nothing, why don't the side batting first keep running until they are out, unless the fielding side have a player holding the ball standing by the wicket.

If sides batting first don't run until they are out, that potentially give the side batting second an advantage - knowing their target they know that they have no choice but to take the risk on that highly unlikely 2nd etc, and 1 time in 100 it will come off....

Or am I just a sour Englishman?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

ed,

I agree the transformation with dhoni is remarkable he is a fine captain now with a wise head on his shoulders. I do hope this crazy price tag does not spoil him now!
Did the bidding not remind you of a slave auction in many ways ( except the players get the money!).

I imagine the english cricketers are a bit upset with not being able to cash in!

Ed said...

The English players are all well trained when it comes to the media so they'll all say the right thing in public, but I suspect that they'll be wishing they could earn mega-bucks for a few weeks work too! My bet is that Pietersen will break rank first as is presumably the most valuable....