About bugs and worms

Recent ODI performances have left spectators with no joy and the Sri Lanka-India-New Zealand tri-series is proof of tedious one-sided affairs.

The national outrage about the ‘New Delhi’ bug (actually, New Delhi Metallo-beta-lactamase-1 or NDM-1) was puzzling. The big story there was that too many patients are being administered antibiotics, and this is likely to make antibiotics much less effective in the future.

Surely the correct response would have been to recognize the problem and take steps to ameliorate the situation. Instead we chose to get angry and indignant; not just because national pride was hurt, but more because a lucrative market for medical tourism was being threatened.

There’s another evil bug too doing the rounds: the bug surrounding one-day international (ODI) cricket. Like antibiotics, we are administering far too much of ODI, and the results are beginning to show.

During the last tri-series in Sri Lanka (was it last month? Can’t remember names, dates and results any more), it was a shock to find a practically empty stadium even for an India-Sri Lanka league game. The spectators were sending out a strong signal: we’re having too much of this ODI nonsense, and, sorry, we aren’t interested any more. TV viewers too have become selective: they switch on only if Sehwag is batting, or Sachin is approaching another century, or during the last five overs of a match inching towards an Indian victory.

What about the players themselves? The smart ones like Sachin Tendulkar have already worked out their stopping rule and would rather not play at all, instead of turning up to play with sharply reduced intensity and fervour. Only the Ravindra Jadejas want to show up because their time is running out and it might be their last opportunity to show off their new dark (or blue or green) eye glasses or equally colourful stubbles.

Little wonder, then, that so many ODI matches are becoming so one-sided these days. The players are simply going through the motions; and if a match looks like a lost cause, they don’t even try to put up a fight. This, for example, is the big story of the ongoing Sri Lanka-India-New Zealand tri-series. Every match in the series has been one-sided!

How could one spot one-sided matches? Simple! Just look at the margin of defeat.

How could one compare two or more one-sided matches? In effect, how could one answer the question: “Which one-sided match was more one-sided?”

There’s an interesting way to answer that question: use the Castrol worm! Arvind Iyengar explains (see http://bit.ly/bHNd1V) how the Castrol worm indicates which team is winning.

The Castrol worm is essentially a plot of every team’s Castrol Index on a ball-by-ball basis. If, at over 30 of the 100-over match, the red Australian Castrol worm is above the green West Indian Castrol worm, it means that Australia is winning at that point.

If the reader can find the time to scroll horizontally on the cricket calendar on www.castrolcricket.com he will be able to see the Castrol worms for all matches in the current SL-India-NZ tri-series.

In the August 16 match that India won easily (the ‘Randiv vs Sehwag match’ as it will now be called), the Sri Lankan worm could not breach the Indian worm even once. It was just the opposite in the Aug 22 match when the Indian worm almost always stayed well below the Sri Lankan worm.

If one worm stays uniformly above the other, with no intersection, it clearly means that it was a one-sided match.

It is now easy to measure the ‘one-sidedness’ of every match. We simply calculate the difference in the Castrol Index of the two teams after every ball, and then sum this difference over all the 600 (or less) balls played in the match (of course taking the sign into account). The greater this sum, the more one-sided was the match.