One-day cricket rain-rule My own method
Copyright George Christos 2003
"I have no line or length, I have no spin or pace, and the only good thing about my bowling is that it is much better than my batting" Vasudaven 1997
Authorities around the world have long been wrestling with the problem with ensuring a fair contest in one-day cricket matches when it is affected by interruptions, such as rain. There are many different rules which have been tried without much success. My 'wicket averaging method' has teams compete on run-rate as before (that is, who scores the most runs per balls faced) but with the added proviso that they have one wicket for every 5 overs (10 for 50 overs). This idea was considered by the ICC (and the ACB) but the ICC went with the Duckworth-Lewis (D/L) method for the World Cup in 1999, because it had already been in used in England in 1998. The D/L method is an unnecessarily complicated: the public do not really know what is going on, nor do the teams. A batsman at the crease wouldn't know what to do if black clouds started moving in, hence the title of one of my papers "I thought it would rain but the clouds passed by" (which just so happens to be a line in a Bob Dylan song. In the D/L method the projected target could suddenly change if a wicket fell. That is absurd. Here are some media links:
Rain, rain, go away ........ - The Cricketer, December 1998. The Cricketer is the number one cricket magazine/journal in the UK. This paper reviews rain-rules and tells why the Duckworth-Lewis method should not be used. The D/L method does not resolve the infamous catastrophe that occurred between South Africa and England in the World cup final in 1992.
Maths and Computers in Sport conference, Bond University, Gold Coast 1998
The Cricketer, world most read cricket magazine, page 1, page 2, correspondence
"rain rain go away, came again another day" The Voice (a Curtin University rag, figuratively speaking)