Let’s be honest, cricket rules are not as simple as football; much of the time the ranks and ratings of teams are the results of the prolonged mathematical calculations and statistics. Duckworth-Lewis Method or at present Duckworth-Lewis-Stern method is one such method that involves intricate mathematical calculations that is often despised by viewers and sometimes by the players themselves simply because they don’t understand exactly how it works. So before proceeding on to why this method is failing especially in the modern T20 format, let’s look back as to what is this Duckworth-Lewis method and how it came into being.
What is Duckworth-Lewis method?
To put it simply, this is a mathematical formulation that is used to calculate which team should win in limited over match, if the match is interrupted by rain or other hazards in weather. It is calculated based on how much assets are left to both the teams where ‘assets’ are usually considered in terms of wickets remaining and the number of deliveries that are left. The winner is calculated on the basis of the probability of a team to win a match of the remaining deliveries having a certain number of wickets in hand. For example, it is considerably easy to pursue 100 runs in 30 with 10 wickets left than with only 3 wickets standing and the D/L technique was the first of its kind to perceive this. Earlier there were other methods like the’ Average Run Rate method’ and the ‘Most Productive Overs’ method that were considered, in case rain interrupted a match. However, these were often found to be less than accurate and to combat this anomaly in results, British statisticians, Frank Duckworth and Tony Lewis formulated this method after rain ruined the 1992 World Cup semi-final match between England and South Africa. In this decisive match, rain stopped play for 12 minutes with South Africa needing 22 runs off 13 balls. The revised target left South Africa needing 21 runs from one ball, a virtually impossible target to reach. So, the two mathematicians who were also closely associated with the England and Wales Cricket Board came up with this apparently full proof technique. This method was seen to produce more accurate results in a limited over match no matter how many times it got interrupted. After the retirements of both Duckworth and Lewis, Professor Steven Stern became the custodian of the method. Hence the name Duckworth-Lewis-Stern aka DLS
|So Why is it losing its charm?
The first reason and the most obvious reason is that most people, including many officials and players themselves had at times complained about the transparency of the method; that most of them hardly understand a bit of this Duckworth-Lewis calculation.
Secondly, DLS works fine till 50 to 40 over matches but fails miserably in even shorter versions of the game like the T20s. The 20 over matches as we know are known for their unpredictability where the game can change in any over and even a single shot or a single ball can turn the tide.
Lastly, Cricket is now more than just a game played on 22yards. It is now played both physically and virtually. Now is the time when Sports and Technology is sharing the same page and while sportsmen tend to battle it on field, normal people tend to play it online in forms of fantasy sports. In India especially, Fantasy cricket is big deal where passion of cricket runs through veins of all the people. In such online games users usually deposit money on players they speculate will perform well in the real live game and in these cases DLS method makes the user question about how the results would be calculated since their chosen batsmen might not get the chance to even bat. Therefore, to the tech savvy youngsters who play online cricket games such methods create ambiguity.
So, although the DLS method undoubtedly was a pioneering approach to calculate the match result, nonetheless at present it is becoming less and less effective in new formats of cricket which is why it needs some serious amendments or need to be discarded as a whole.
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