2 + 2 = 30 off 3.4 overs

Chris Gayle doesn't seem like the kind of bloke who's spent too much of his spare time hunched at the kitchen table chewing on his pencil and trying to calibrate the perfect system for calculating revised targets in cricket matches affected by rain.

Yet he and the rest of the world have worked out that Duckworth Lewis doesn't cut it in T20. The reason for that is because they're still using the 50 over calculations sheet in an entirely different format.

Still, the ICC have only had a year to ask D-L to re-work things, and it's not as if there's much T20 cricket being played around the world, so it's probably something they can leave for a while longer...

Stats life

This morning the skies were a blameless blue, but they knew what they'd done last night, oh yes... 

When the great rains swept the Oval and Duckworth-Lewis set West Indies 80 in nine overs my immediate thought was, 'that's low', and I wanted England to win not just for the obvious reason, but because questioning dear old D-L afterwards would seem less like sour grapes.

It's not. England aren't out of the tournament because of Duckworth-Lewis. The fault-lines that run through the team are all too apparent: they're a super-eights type side, nothing more and occasionally less. 

And yet... In the sharp-end super-eight games of the past few days, scores of 144, 153, 159 and 158 have all been successfully defended. D-L is a essentially a measure of worth and in the light of recent history, England's 161 felt like it was worth more than 80 from nine. Even the blunt, base-rate over-by-over comparison  shows that England were 75-2 after nine of their regular twenty.

I'm not numerate enough to understand how the D-L calculation is calibrated, but I don't think that the calibration has been adjusted since 2004 to allow for the rising primacy of the bat, and for the mindset that has accompanied it.

Perhaps the simplest way to load the calculation would be to adjust the number of available batsmen. What really swung last night's D-L figure in favour of the batting side was the 10 wickets in hand. England would have had to take more than one per over to bowl them out. A ratio of, say, seven batsmen - ie six wickets to win - would have felt fairer on the bowling team.

NB: Another delicious little titbit came to light on the radio - apparently net run rates would have been adjusted to allow for D-L if points could not separate the sides. Good luck working that one out, boys...

Update: The Guardian are reporting that Duckworth-Lewis will be revised towards the end of the year to reflect the increase in T20 data - reinforcing a point made by Dave Barry in the comments below.