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Pass me the calculator
Because cricket involves chasing run targets in an allocated amount of time or number of overs, the captains are constantly having to plan using numbers. The strategy they adopt depends on the state of the game.
Test cricket
Declarations
Night watchman
Enforcing the follow-on
One-day strategies
Scoring rate strategies
Rain strategies
Test cricket
Declarations
Why declare? Almost always, declarations are made to give the batting side enough time to bowl the opposition out. Declarations often involve a very fine calculation by the captain, and sometimes they backfire.
Here are some examples of real matches that had reached a particular position. What would you have done at this point? Click to find out the result:
Case study 1: Australia versus England at Sydney in 1995
It is 2.57pm on the fourth day of the third Test. England, 2-0 down in the five-match series, lead by 448 runs. No team in the history of Test cricket has scored more than 406 to win in the final innings. Graeme Hick, who has yet to make a century against Australia, is 98 not out. Tea is usually taken at 3.40pm. The scores so far in the match:
England 1st innings: 309
Australia 1st innings: 116
England 2nd innings: 255 for 2
As England captain, what would you do now?
What happened
Case study 2: England versus the West Indies at Lord's in 1984
It is 5.10 pm on the fourth day of the Test match. England leads by 328 runs over the mighty West Indies who are at the peak of their powers. Allan Lamb is batting superbly, and is 110 not out ('seeing the ball like a football' is how it is often described). Cloud is building and it is getting gloomy. The umpires offer the batsmen the chance to go off for bad light. If they accept, that will be the end of play for the day. The scores so far are:
England 1st innings: 286
West Indies 1st innings: 245 (Botham took 8 wickets)
England 2nd innings: 287 for 7
As England captain, what would you instruct your batsmen to do now?
What happened
Case study 3: Australia versus England at Brisbane in 1950
It is the first Ashes Test of the series. In their first innings, Australia scored 228. Then it rained, turning the pitch into what is known as a 'sticky wicket' (which is very difficult to bat on). It is now shortly before lunch on the third day, and England have been reduced to 68 for 7, trailing by 160. The pitch is still nearly impossible to bat on, but if it dries out batting will become easier.
As England captain, what would you do now?
What happened
Night watchman
Custom has it that, if a wicket falls within half an hour of the close of play, a night watchman – ie, a non-specialist batsman - is sent in to prevent the potential loss of a more valuable batsman. Sometimes a night watchman performs way beyond his brief, none more so than Tony Mann of Australia who in 1977 at Perth went on to get a century and lead his side to victory. But night watchmen can fail, too. One, or sometimes even two, night watchmen have been known to get out that evening, helping nobody.
Case study 4: England versus Pakistan at Old Trafford in 1987
England lose their second wicket 20 minutes before stumps. According to the scorecard Neil Fairbrother, a local lad, is the next man in, but this is his Test match debut so he might be doubly nervous. Also in the batting line-up are John Emburey and Phil DeFreitas, both effective all-rounders, albeit better known for their bowling.
As England captain, which batsman would you send in now?
What happened
Enforcing the follow-on
In a Test match, if a team that bats first manages to bowl the opposition out for 200 fewer runs, the first team can enforce the follow-on. For example, if England scored 420 and Australia scored 190, England could enforce the follow-on.
Custom has long dictated that if a captain has the option to enforce the follow-on, he should do so. The rationale is simple: maintain the pressure on batsmen who are probably demoralised, bowl them out again and leave enough time, if needed, to score the requisite number of runs for victory. Some captains - notably Australia's Mark Taylor in the late 1990s - challenged conventional thinking, reasoning that asking the opposition to follow gives them a glimmer of hope of victory. Batting again, building up a massive lead and setting an unassailable target would extinguish that hope.
Case study 5: England versus Australia at Headingley in 1981
Australia were 1-0 up in the series. The pitch was poor from the start, and deteriorating. Australia batted first and made an admirable 401 in the first innings. England made only 174 in reply, finishing their innings at tea on the Saturday afternoon. The match was barely half way through. Australia led by 227, the bowlers were reasonably fresh and, in any case, the next day (Sunday) was a rest day. The weather forecast was mixed, so there was likely to be time lost in the next two days. On the other hand, this pitch was getting worse all the time and batting last on it would be difficult.
As Australia captain, would you enforce the follow-on or not?
What happened
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Sri Lanka 1996 (Allsport)
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One-day strategies
One-day cricket doesn't have the scope for declarations and other time decisions, but there are still plenty of calculations for the captain to make.
Scoring-rate strategies
The team batting first has a relatively easy time of it in its batting calculations. In a 50 over match, the objective is to score as many runs as possible. The more risks you take, the faster you can score runs but there is a trade off because taking risks also means you are likely to lose more wickets. The golden rule is never to allow your team to be bowled out within the 50 overs. If a team scores at 6 runs per over but finds itself at 120 for 8 off 20 overs, it would be unwise to keep slogging. It's better at this stage to play safe and score at 3 per over for 30 overs (total 210) than to continue at 6 an over with the risk of getting out five overs later (total 150).
The team batting second has more to think about. They know at any time how many runs are required off how many overs. If the required rate ever creeps above six runs per over (ie, one run per ball), teams know that this will be hard to achieve unless there are plenty of wickets in hand.
Make a steady start…
In the early days of one-day cricket, the team batting second tended to play one-day matches with the same mindset as for Test cricket. In other words, they played cautiously at the beginning. This could sometimes be disastrous. For example, this was how things stood at one point in the World Cup final of 1979:
West Indies: 286 for 9 (off 60 overs)
England: 129 for 0 (off 38 overs)
At first glance England was in a very solid position. But look at the runs required and the overs remaining. England's openers Brearley and Boycott had batted so slowly that the team now needed 158 more runs off just 22 overs - at a massive 7+ runs per over. Against the West Indies bowling, this proved too big a challenge and England were bowled out for 196.
….or go for broke!
The World Cup of 1996 saw a complete reversal in the strategy of opening batsmen. Sri Lanka introduced a strategy that became known as pinch-hitting. Here the objective was to score as quickly as possible at the beginning of the innings, and then ease off later. One example was their group game against India:
India: 271 for 3 off 50 overs (target run rate was 271/50, or 5.42 per over)
Sri Lanka: 117 for 1 after 15 overs (run rate 7.8 per over) and 272 for 4 after 48.4 overs (run rate of 4.6 for the remainder of the innings)
Sri Lanka won, helped no doubt by taking pressure off themselves by scoring runs quickly early in their innings.
This approach was key to Sri Lanka winning the World Cup that year, but for some reason as a tactic it has fizzled out. The standard approach now is to sustain a fairly even run rate throughout the innings before accelerating in the last ten overs. However, statisticians at University College London have demonstrated that the Sri Lankan pinch-hitting tactic is actually the best approach for the second innings of a one-day match. In the recent NatWest series Australia revived the early run blitz approach with great success – Adam Gilchrist and Ricky Ponting were the main perpetrators.
Rain strategies
One-day matches are supposed to be completed in a single day, and since a 'draw' is not a permitted result, organisers have had to devise methods to allow for a result when rain interrupts play.
Run-rate method
For many years, rain-affected matches were adjusted on what was called the run-rate method. Here is an example from as recently as 1997:
New Zealand: 253 for 8 off 50 overs
England: 47 for 0 off 6 overs (Pinch-hitting was obviously still in vogue at this time)
Then it rained.
After the rain, there was only time to squeeze in a further 20 overs, so the target was revised. Since New Zealand had scored 253 in 50 overs, at 5.06 per over, the rules stated that England would have to score at the same rate but for fewer overs - in this case, 5.06 runs per over for a total of 26 overs, making the revised target 132 runs. England had 20 overs to score the remaining 85 runs, and did so very easily. Since the 1970s, there had been a growing feeling that this method of run adjustment was always unfair to one of the teams, but as it was so simple to calculate it survived for many years.
Best overs method
Eventually it was realised that the run-rate method almost always gave a big advantage to the side that had to play fewer overs. With ten wickets in hand, it is much easier to score 100 runs in 20 overs than 250 runs in 50 overs.
To overcome this bias, various systems were invented. Most notorious was the one devised for the World Cup in Australia in 1992. In this system, if any overs were lost to rain, the target for the side batting second was reduced by the number of runs scored in the least productive overs of the side batting first. This was intended to make things harder for the team batting second, but it led to some curious results. For example, what happened if the first team scored 200 in 50 overs, of which five had been maiden overs, and it now rained for 20 minutes? The team batting second only had time for 45 overs. The least productive five overs of the opponents had produced no runs, so the team batting second now had to score 200 off 45 overs instead of 50 overs. A trifle unfair.
In fact, some of the outcomes were farcical. In the World Cup semi-final against England, South Africa required 22 runs off 13 balls, an eminently achievable target. Then it rained. When the players came out again the recalculation said South Africa now needed 21 runs....off one ball. Impossible! There was practically a riot, and the system was never used again.
Duckworth-Lewis method
Rain adjustments in one-day cricket are now dealt with by the Duckworth-Lewis (D/L) method. It has far fewer anomalies than its predecessors. Whenever rain strikes, the statistically based D/L method is designed to leave the balance of the match unchanged.
The basic principle behind the D/L method is that it's not just the runs required that matters, it is also the number of wickets that a team has left. It is much easier to chase 100 runs with ten wickets left than with one wicket left - because, of course, with one wicket left the team has no 'lives' to spare.
The adjustments that the D/L method makes try to ensure that after a rain break, the relative chances of the two teams winning the match are roughly the same. If the team batting second (Australia, say) were 'ahead' before the rain break, then they should still be ahead after the rain break. A team is ahead if the projected runs that it is going to make after its full allocation of overs is higher than the opposition's total.
One benefit from all this is that the scoreboard can show the crowd at any point which team is ahead. If rain washes out the game, the team that was ahead when the rain came wins. This means that if rain is threatening, the batting side might actually adjust its tactics to try to get ahead of the rate, monitoring the scoreboard after each over. (England appeared to do this in their World Cup match against Kenya in 1999).
D/L has added a whole new level of tactical batting, but the price that spectators pay for this ingenious system is that the system itself is very complicated. It requires a book of tables and a reasonable aptitude for manipulating formulae to work out the revised targets. Unlike the other rain methods, it is almost impossible for spectators to work it out for themselves, so they have to take the results on trust. A form of cricket that was designed to appeal to the masses has inadvertently introduced a rule that by its very nature puts many of the masses off.
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