T20 wins with least resource expended

Winning a T20 game without losing too many wickets or wasting too many deliveries is a rarity. Our expert analyses such victories in his latest.

When I was working on my previous article which was on ODI wins, I was struck by the margins of wins with so little resources expended. My thoughts went to the Twenty20 game and I wondered how the table would look like in this format. I was certain that the margins would be nowhere near the ODI margins and my expectation proved correct. This is mainly because of the lower number of overs available and the general attitude of batsmen which is to take more risks.

This article refers to chasing wins. The chasing team has two types of resources available: Wickets and Balls. When a team chases and wins, it expends some extent of both types of resources. A team could expend nothing on the wickets front, by winning by 10 wickets but some balls have to be used up. Wickets and Balls are assigned equal weight: 50% each. The top order wickets are valued at a higher level.

Let us look at the table. This table looks at matches in which the teams won expending less than 66.7% of the total resources available.


It is surprising that the first two matches involved established Test-playing nations being taken to the cleaners. Sri Lanka, after scoring a below-par 101, saw this total being overhauled with no loss of a wicket and nearly half the overs remaining. Hence the availability of nearly 75% resources. Pakistan’s match ran a parallel path. A half-decent score of 129 being overhauled in round 13 overs. Again, the resources left were over 70%. Kenya scored only 73, but had the consolation of capturing a wicket which lowered the resource remaining to around 68%.

Now comes a familiar pattern. India scored 74 and were vanquished by Australia for the loss of a wicket and in 11 overs. The lower rate of scoring meant that the resource available was below 60%.

Amongst the most impressive of these wins is the one by West Indies against Australia, who scored 169, a potentially winning score. Chris Gayle had other ideas and his 88 helped West Indies win with 7 wickets and 4 overs to spare, leading to a resource availability of over 40%. Australia had lost a similar match to India earlier in 2009.

Possibly the most astounding match amongst these is the one in which West Indies scored 205, a winning score 79 times out of 80 (real numbers). Then, Gibbs played a blinder and South Africa won with 8 wickets and over 2 overs to spare. The latter is the amazing number. They could easily have chased another 30 runs.