The commentators were saying that in the majority of games the teams batting second have a difficult time getting the runs- the wickets have seemed to slow after about thirty overs. I would certainly hope that the toss isn’t the deciding factor.
Maybe the semi-finals and final should look to eliminate the toss as a factor by playing them as “best of two” games, with each side being deemed to win the toss once each. Obviously if one side wins both games, they progress, if not then the margin of victory is used to decide (and if that is level they have a super over).
How would you decide the difference between a 4 ticket win and a 10 run win?
Call me cynical, but I doubt that a pitch would be prepared that would ever disadvantage the home team. I was in a cricket message and this was discussed (the toss) and nothing satisfactory was ever presented.
On a finals tack, and I think Australia has a better balanced and improved team than at the start. Heaven only knows if that will be enough to beat the other finalists - obviously fine teams- but I’m trying to give myself some hope. Obviously if Starc gets an ingrown toe nail he would be nigh impossible to replace.
Neesham impressed me a lot last night in terms of containment if not in strike power. Southee seems a light of former days.
Up here, in the County Championship 4 Day stuff, they instituted a ruling a few years ago that the away side could either insert the opposition, without a toss, or hold the toss anyway. The theory being that the away side could take a look at the wicket and make some sort of decision, and this would negate home cooked pitches. The jury is out on whether this has been a success - actual numbers probably need looking at - but my confirmation bias says that a lot more games have gone into day 4 than they used to and that the away side has had a fighting chance a bit more.
The problem in a tournament such as this is there is no home side - except when England are playing, and it would seem a bit weird to have a toss ruling in every game involving them (though you could argue it negates home advantage throughout the tournament, I suppose - which makes it fairer overall - quantifying this would probably be hard).
I think it’s been a good tournament for the bowlers - they’ve performed well (would agree that Neesham kept it tight for instance, Australia have built off the back of good bowling performances, as have India, and England’s two most recent wins have demonstrated the importance of Woakes, Archer, Plunkett and Wood strangling the first 20 overs). This is the point before the balls go softer - Bairstow and Roy going hard after the new ball has been a major feature of England too and it is telling that England’s middle order has largely struggled - so is critical for arresting boundaries. I also think the pitches have not been as flat as was thought, which has not helped scoring rates. England have been forced away from their strategy by the conditions and good bowling, imo. If they could batter everyone for 50 overs, I think they would be doing it.
Thanks Cumbrian. I meant to say “cricket message board” and the discussion went on for years. In the end I think the toss was considered pretty fair all around. That England happens to have a powerful fast scoring top order means good luck to them. At the end of their innings last night the tail enders seemed to be able to score boundaries, albeit with taking the associated risks and the field settings changed.
I have seen very little of the second innings due to time differences. Just having a quick look it seems that 13 teams batting second have won as opposed to 23 batting first. (I stand to be corrected). A lot of the outcomes would have been expected no matter what order they batted. It seems inconsistent though in that Australia have lost one batting second (against India) and also won one. (Afghanistan). I can’t draw much from that , as when they have batted first they have rarely scored huge scores. (Sorry to concentrate on Australia but they are my focus).
No. Don’t know.
And that six from Hetmyer was one of the cleanest strikes I have seen since Gilchrist.
NRR is a thorny issue, there probably needs to be metric or index by which we break tied positions and so if not NRR then what?
The biggest mark against it is that it doesn’t fully capture the nature of a performance for bowling and batting. If a team bats 200 for their 50 and you knock it off with 10 overs to spare and 8 wickets left, that is different (or at least it feels different to me) from doing it with 10 overs to spare and 9 down. But that isn’t reflected in NRR at all.
Could wickets remaining be included as a weighting factor? boundaries? I’m not sure. Also we need to be careful not to over complicate matters by including to many factors as we then give further opportunities to play the game according to those additional factors, rather than the central desire to win the match outright.
NRR, of course! 
You could argue that a lot of the pitches in this tournament have not suited the home team. I believe groundsmen will always vehemently deny preparing a pitch to suit one side or the other, and while it does no doubt happen sometimes, I don’t think it’s been an issue in World Cups.
The absolute best method is a scheduled play-off day (effectively a quarter-final) between two teams tied on points for fourth and fifth in the table. It might add a little time to the tournament, and a fair bit of cost booking all the broadcasting stuff that may well not be needed, but it is the fairest way. Of course, even that only gets you so far - if 3 teams are level on points for fourth spot, you need at least 2 games to resolve things (whereby one team has a lucky bye to the ‘quarter-final’ and the other two play-off for a chance to face them in what could be described as a ‘last-16’ match; creating the amusing distinction of two teams who, after 9 games in a 10-team tournament, qualify for the last 16 :)). But you could draw the line at one quarter-final day and then revert to NRR (or some other method) to separate other ties, which would still be an improvement. Perhaps the cost-benefit analysis of such steps would say they are not worth it.
Yes, fair comment. My suggestion of double headers (with NRR as a tiebreaker) was only semi-serious.
I think it might have been Penultima Thule on the Rolling Cricket Thread (which could probably do with resurrection post World Cup) that said that there was some method in play in junior cricket in Australia that works out how heavy a defeat is. Something like saying: there’s 100 overs and 20 wickets material in the game, a win by 4 wickets using less material is “better” than a win by 4 wickets using more material - and this then allows you to use the “material used” to try and compare wins by runs versus wins by wickets. But I can’t find the relevant post at the minute and am doubtless garbling this horrendously. Maybe they’ll enlighten us. Still, there’s potentially something there - though it might be a bit more complicated than the NRR calculation.
Back in the actual cricket, good on Windies and Afghanistan for putting on a good show in their dead rubber, seems it’s been quite and exciting and fairly close game. Hope Afghanistan are not too despondent at not picking up a win, they came close a few times, all credit to them.
I would have liked to see Afghanistan get at least one win but I think in the end they ended up with the result that was deserved. There was some pretty bad fielding from them last night- really patchy- but overall there has been enough encouragement from their performances to enable them to look forward to 2023.
Regarding the use of NRR, there were lots of calculations as to what score PAK needed to post vs BAN and then dismiss them to improve their NRR sufficiently.
But even had the task been realistic, if BAN won the toss and batted the question was moot.
If the tiebreaker result is actually determined by the toss you might as well just use a coin toss as the tiebreaker or scissors, paper, rock in the case of a three way tie.
In Sydney grade cricket the tiebreaker after competition points is called the Quotient
It’s sufficiently complicated so that to play strategically to increase it isn’t really practical.
The only time it swings dramatically after the opening few games of a season is if a team has conceded (or taken) very few wickets to date and then in a single game gets say bowled out twice.
For one day matches there is also a bonus point system that teams are awarded an additional point if the win is achieved within 80% of the available overs i.e. 40/50 overs or 32/40.
A double bonus point win if achieved within 60% pf the available overs i.e. 30/50 overs or 24/40.
It doesn’t matter whether the win is achieved with plenty of wickets in hand or 9 down.
There may be merit in the idea of using the Duckworth-Lewis algorithm to predict the team batting second’s 50 over score and compare total runs for against total runs against but that metric favours the strong batting sides vs strong bowling sides.
I’d be more comfortable with a metric based on actual performance rather than potential performance.
At least the Quotient takes into account wickets taken/lost. NRR only measures half of the game.
A look through the tournament shows that Pakistan have a Quotient of 1.03, and NZ 1.18, thanks to a killer bowling average from the first few games where they bowled their first three opponents out for less than 250.
This isn’t a insurmountable a difference as the nrr gap, and I think Pak could have some hope of overtaking them - although they would have to hammer Ban. For instance, if they score 300/5 and bowl Bangladesh out for 200,they would sneak in front. 300/6 wouldn’t be enough.
I’m liking this Quotient though. It’s not heavily weighed in favour of batting first, for a start (NZ bowled SL out for 136 and in by 10 wickets, resulting in an effectively infinite Quotient).
Do Pakistan really deserve to get through though? The washed out games may have altered things but it seems that the final standings (as they are at present) are a pretty fair equation of performances.
Just for something totally different, I was trying to remember the first First Club game I went to. I think it was in 1964 when our school teacher took the class to the Gabba to watch Qld play Pakistan (I’m not sure how he got away with that). Anyone else care to share their experiences?
Courtesy of Cricinfo’s StatsGuru
Bat Ave
Afghanistan 21.0
Australia 38.7
Bangladesh 38.1
England 41.2
India 47.2
New Zealand 32.8
Pakistan 32.9
South Africa 35.0
Sri Lanka 24.7
West Indies 30.3
Grand Total 33.3
Bowl Ave
Afghanistan 41.9
Australia 28.6
Bangladesh 40.0
England 29.9
India 28.0
New Zealand 27.9
Pakistan 35.5
South Africa 34.4
Sri Lanka 36.6
West Indies 36.9
Grand Total 33.3
Quotient
Afghanistan 0.502
Australia 1.357
Bangladesh 0.953
England 1.376
India 1.688
New Zealand 1.177
Pakistan 0.928
South Africa 1.018
Sri Lanka 0.673
West Indies 0.820
Grand Total 1.000
To qualify, Pakistan need to bowl Bangladesh out for 7.
Those quotients are interesting - for instance, SA have been terrible but their quotient is alright. Obviously they’d have been knocked out on the basis of points from wins, but it’s interesting to me at least to wonder what it actually means for their level of performance. Overall the quotient seems to do a reasonable job - or at least it has in this case.
They’ve been batting about the NRR conundrum on The Guardian’s Over by Over coverage today. A solution brought up there was a) for sides winning by runs, to give them the runs they won by, b) for sides winning by wickets, give them the runs by which they’re ahead of the DLS par score when they win, c) provide minus runs on the same basis for the losing side. In this particular situation, Pakistan would have needed to beat Bangladesh by 130 runs, which would have at least been more exciting than trying to equalise the NRR. I am sure that there is something wrong with it but it seems as good a suggestion as any - though relies on what, for most people, is the black box of DLS.
Re: Cicero’s post. Being from Cumbria, I didn’t see any decent standard county cricket until I moved to London in 2003 and, after I moved closer to the ground, started going to The Oval regularly in 2014. Saw some local club cricket when I was a kid. The first match of substance I saw was a school trip - we all went to Old Trafford to watch England v New Zealand in 1994. It was 199/4 at the close of the day - Atherton was on 99 not out and was stuck there for about 3 or 4 overs before close of play. He got his ton off the first ball the following day, when we weren’t there, the bastard. It was the only time I got to see Graham Gooch bat in the flesh - he got out for a golden duck.
I obviously typed the numbers into the calculator wrong.
The difference in Quotient is even more stark then, and I suspect that Pak would have had to win similarly hugely to overcome the Quotient difference than the NRR difference.
The idea isn’t particularly to give Pak a chance in this particular instance, but to show that NRR is unfairly balanced towards teams who bat first and win - with NRR, Pak had no chance to overtake NZ if they’d bowled first. Under a Quotient system, they would have a (however unlikely) chance.
Anyway, Ban are 9/0, so Pak are out of the world cup from here, but I’d suggest the game is theirs - 315 is a hell of a lot to chase down.
[QUOTE=Teuton;21733702… 315 is a hell of a lot to chase down.[/QUOTE]
Unless I missed something, Bangladesh has been the only team to chase down a 300+ score this whole tournament (against SA). No other team has even successfully chased a 250+ score (although there have been 2nd innings higher than that).