Cricket has witnessed some of the most bizarre incidents due to rain. Be it South Africa's exit in the 2003 World Cup or England's loss to West Indies in the ICC T20 Championship. Both the times the blame was put on a faulty system of calculation, namely the Duckworth-Lewis system.
The method, especially, in the shortest and newest format of the game has faced heavy scrutiny. More recently, the system caused a furore in the Indian Premier League when in a rain-curtailed match, the Kochi Tuskers Kerala triumphed over the Chennai Super Kings.
CSK who had made 131 in their 17 overs (cut short from the usual 20) were over-hauled by a spirited Kochi assault with almost two overs to spare.
The Chennai team was 65/2 in nine overs when rain stopped play. Suresh Raina was batting comfortably on 23 (off 22 balls) with the new batsman Subramaniam Badrinath. But after play resumed, Chennai were asked to bat for another eight overs and it failed to capitalise on the promising start.
While the system is supposed to take into account average scores, it does not do so in the T20 format and therefore, Chennai were left short of runs. Their team ultimately succumbed to a spirited Kochi, who had a pre-determined target on mind.
Chennai coach Stephen Fleming said after the game that "it is a disadvantage. There is an anomaly and shouldn't be around. (The system cost) CSK 20 runs."
Fleming went on record calling it "rubbish" for Twenty 20 matches.
The CSK coach's voice surprisingly found an ally in the opposite camp. Mahela Jaywardhene, the captain of the winning team, too found his reasons to express displeasure.
"It has to be reviewed. Duckworth/Lewis is a method which they came up for ODIs. To my limited knowledge, they do take an average score to make that formula. I think it is somewhere around 230 or 240. So once you take an average score like that and apply that in Twenty20s, the whole thing is different
"You start from a 50-over match and then you start with 20-over match or 18-over game or 17-over game and you work backwards. So that average score is something you really need to look at," said the Sri Lankan batsman.
However, Jaywardhene admitted that cricket cannot do away with such methods of calculations.
"It is tough. But we need that sort of a calculation for situations like this. It is not easy. But there is room for improvement in all areas," he said.
Keeping the fact in mind that cricket has changed a lot since the method’s inception in 1996/97, the D/L method has been revised and updated from time to time. It seems the time has arrived for it to go through another face-lift for the sake of the game’s new-born baby Twenty20.
Even the inceptor Tony Lewis was quoted admitting its frailties.
"Certainly, people have suggested that we need to look very carefully and see whether in fact the numbers in our formula are totally appropriate for the Twenty20 game," says the man behind the method.
That is because even Lewis knows that unless it changes with time, repeated incidents like this might lead to the method’s total abandonment.
Parallels have already started coming up. Recently, V Jayadevan, an Indian engineer, came up with a new system for calculation of rain-marred matches. The BCCI's technical committee, headed by Sunil Gavaskar went on to recommend the VJD method to be implemented in IPL 4.
Though it didn't happen this time, future awaits a change unless Duckworth-Lewis realise that times have changed.
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