Because I have been asked (see, some people do read the cricket posts).

Yesterday should have seen a 50-over-a-side match between England and New Zealand in Birmingham. In practice it rained much of the day. There are rules to cope with this sort of thing. They eventually started play around 3:00pm, and England managed 24 overs of batting. After the break, New Zealand came out knowing they were operating under the infamous Duckworth-Lewis rules for shortened games. They would have less overs to bat than England. A minimum of 23 were possible in the time available, but if the game could be further shortened and the D/L algorithm would decide who won when the game was stopped. The main concern was that at least 20 overs had to be bowled, otherwise the game would be declared abandoned. (Baseball has a similar rule about the minimum number of innings that must be played.)

The New Zealand batsmen did a pretty good job, and it looked like McCullum and Styris would guide their team to victory, but weather kept getting worse and rain began to fall. With 19 overs bowled the rain got much heavier and the umpires took the teams off. The official result was therefore “match abandoned”. If the final over had been bowled and then the players had gone off, the game could have finished one of several ways. If NZ had made 7 or more runs, they would have won. If they had made 6 the game would have been tied. If they had made less then 6 England would have won. If England had taken one or more wickets the target would have been recalculated, and more runs would have been required for an NZ win. NZ were the favorites, but victory was not guaranteed.

Both teams have been commendably relaxed about this. Daniel Vettori could have made a big fuss about England bowling slowly and the umpires saving them from defeat, but he graciously acknowledged that England did nothing he wouldn’t have done if his side had been bowling. England, of course, still entertained hopes of winning the game, which would have put them 2-0 up in a series of 5.

If the players are not complaining about being taken off then I’m not going to either. The conditions did look dreadful. However, there has been considerable concern about the half hour break taken between innings when the weather was playable. Half an hour is apparently the mandatory break for a 50-over game. But this wasn’t a 50-over game; England had only batted 24 overs. The usual break for a Twenty20 game is around 10 minutes. I was working when all this happened (with the BBC commentary turned off because I was sick of listening to Agnew whining) but my mother, who was watching Sky, tells me that the umpires insisted they had no choice but to stick to the 30 minute break. If that’s so, the the rules are clearly daft and need to be changed. Professional sport is a form of entertainment. A lot of people paid good money to sit in the rain at Edgbaston freezing their butts off, and they deserved to get as much cricket as was possible. There ought to be a way for the match officials to reduce the break in a shortened game.

But there may be another issue here. As I understand it, if the game is officially abandoned with some play being possible then the spectators are entitled to a refund of half their ticket price. Had the 20th over been bowled, that would not be the case. So it may well be that what the umpires and players did (probably by accident, but you never know) was to give the crowd as much cricket as they could under the rules and still allow them to claim their refunds. There seems to be a certain amount of merit in that result.