In the US, you “draw” an opponent in a tournament schedule, and the match between the opponents could be called a “draw”. You “tie” when the contestants finish with identical scores and there is no winner.
In the UK, apparently, a tournament matchup is a “tie”, while a winnerless result is called a “draw”.
The use of “draw” to mean what we would call a tie is not unheard of here, but it’s not used in a pro sports context except maybe as a Roget synonym when a sportscaster is afraid of saying the word “tie” too many times in one turn. The UK soccer world’s use of the word “tie” boggles me, though.
How did this difference come about? Why are they opposites, instead of there being four (or at least three) different words instead of two that switch for each other?
Not quite true. For instance in football (soccer) we would say “the draw for the third round of the FA Cup” to refer to the process of pairing teams. However an individual game in a cup competition is a “cup-tie”. A game in which both teams score the same number of goals is a “draw”, never a “tie”.
But in cricket the usage is different. A “draw” indicates that time ran out before both sides could complete their two innings. A “tie” indicates that both teams completed their innings and ended up scoring the same number of runs (since hundreds of runs are scored by each side in a cricket match, this is extremely rare, but it does happen).
Ah, OK. I don’t think that would generally be understood here, but I guess I can’t speak for people who are completely unknowledgeable about sports in other countries.
OK, yeah , that’s what I was thinking of.
Right.
(Any idea why? Or why we say it differently?)
:eek: They play just two innings in a game? Some baseball teams from Florida are lucky to score two runs in nine innings!
It’s worse than that. They play two innings in Test cricket (the full form of the game, which can go on for up to five days), which is what I was referring to in my previous post. There’s a cut-down version called “one-day cricket” in which they only play one innings each (and usually don’t finish that, though this doesn’t result in a draw as the rules are different in the one-day game).
The duration of an innings in cricket varies enormously.
They can last for between two hours (there has probably been a shorter innings) and 3 days. A day in cricket begins at circa 11 am and finishes at 6 pm but very often there is a requirement for a minimum number of overs to be bowled in one day. Subject to the prevailing weather conditions.
Someone will probably come along with accurate figures but you get the idea.
We are getting into a very complex area with cricket, whereby any answer given tends to generate millions of supplementary questions.
PS. I’m going to the Cheltenham cricket festival for the day. I’ll be back in a couple of months.
PPS. If anbody even mentions the Duckworth/Lewis method of calculating the winning team in the event of a rain-interrupted one day fixture I’ll…well, luckily I’ve got to leave the house very soon.
Yes, but in cricket, a batsman isn’t out just because he missed the ball three times - the bowler has to knock over the wicket that the batsman is defending - and the batsman doesn’t go back and sit in the dugout just because he scored a run. Also, only one man can be put out on any one play, and a side isn’t out until ten out of the eleven batsmen are out (because there must be two men in at any time, the eleventh batsman is left with no partner).
It’s not unheard of for a side to be all out in a couple of hours, though it’s unusual. At the other end of the scale, a side can go all day without anyone being out. On average, in a five-day match, you’d expect about eight “outs” (we’d say “wickets”, it’s a multi-use context-sensitive word) per day - just over one per hour.