First Duckworth, then Lewis?

Our expert ponders over splitting ODI cricket and analyses scenarios of what might have been.

Everyone’s talking of ‘splitting’ ODI cricket. Sachin Tendulkar too talked about it recently, but this talk had been in the air even before Sachin endorsed it.

The talk is of an ODI match being made up of 25+25+25+25 overs instead of 50+50 overs. So if we are talking of an India-Sri Lanka ODI match (again!), we can have the following situation: India bat their first 25 overs, score 156/2 with Sehwag out after a blistering 74 … then Sri Lanka (SL) pad up to bat their first 25 overs, and maybe score 128/1 … then India return to resume their innings from 156/2 … and so on.

Remember that India resume their innings. So we don’t see Sehwag batting a second time.

There’s a lot of debate out there whether we should start the next 25 overs afresh, i.e., open again with Sehwag. However, that is not very clever; it would simply involve playing two T25 matches in a day. The ‘split’ ODI seems to offer more interesting possibilities.

The ‘split’ ODI experiment is likely to be attempted this season when Australia play England. It should be fun, especially if there is no rain.

It might be even more fun if there is rain and we have to reset targets using the Duckworth-Lewis (D/L) method. Remember these will be 50-over games where we all agree that D/L now does a fine job. The question is how to employ the method in split ODIs.

Consider our fictitious India-SL match. Imagine that, on resumption, India collapse to 170/6 after 30 overs when a downpour finishes off the match.

So who won? Remember both teams have played more than 20 overs … so a result is mandatory!

A quick look-up (of the Standard D/L table, not Professional D/L table) suggests that SL win easily. SL’s par score, with 25 overs bowled and 1 wickets lost, in relation to India’s 170/6 in 30 overs, is well below 128 (SL par score 88; SL win by 40 runs).

What if India were 170/2? 170/3? Or 170/4? Once again, a look-up of the Standard D/L table suggests that India either win or tie at 170/2 and lose at 170/3 (SL par score 121) and 170/4 (par score 110).

Let us consider another example. Imagine India are 156/2 after 25 overs and SL have reached 110/1 in 21 overs when there is a fatal interruption.

At the point where the match is stopped, SL’s par score was 117; so SL lose.

Our simple examples suggest that teams will have to track the par score on almost a ball-by-ball basis. Since the par score is itself deeply influenced by the fall of wickets (especially in the first half of each team’s innings), batsmen are likely to bat very cautiously in their respective first innings on a cloudy morning … because the loss of every early wicket will push the par score up by 15-20 runs.

Ironically, we could see the “boring” 25 middle overs – that split ODIs are trying to enrich – actually being played out first by both teams before the fireworks start.