In my last post I wrote about some folks celebrating Mr Viral Kohli's century against Bangladesh. Mr Kohli once again played for his own statistics when playing against New Zealand. Instead of quickly securing victory, he played to secure his century. He failed of course to get his century.
It is now clear that despite India being on top of the table, she is third in the net run rate. Here is the table at the end of play on 24th Oct 2023.
(click on the table to view the full table)
The difference between India and South Africa's run rate is more than 1, or, India is approximately 51 runs behind South Africa in every game till now.
South Africa and New Zealand have a fixture on 1st November. One of them will win. India also has a tryst with South Africa later. One of us will win. But clearly, all things being equal, it is more than likely that the NRR will decide the top position. The second and third position in the semis do not matter as much, because each will play against the other in the semis. It is the top team that will meet the weakest of the four in the semis.
Right from the word go India should have aimed at setting up a runaway net run rate. Individual statistics are subservient to team goals.
2 comments:
Absolutely true.
If we go down the Against column in the table, it is only against India that there is a full 250 in the denominator of the fraction. All other teams have less. Now, this is the fraction that is substracted in the NRR therefore we need the max in the denominator in this fraction, to make the fraction as small as possible. What we can change is the denominator in the For column to as low as possible to make the For fraction as big as possible. In other words, end the game as quickly as possible.
Why we are not emphasising of the numerator of the fraction in the For column is because 50% of the time, a team is batting second, and the team has no control over what its opponents score. In any case the team batting second would always want the opponents to score as less as possible.
So, if we look at Australia's For column, we fill find that she has scored very few runs for herself. Yet, she is the best of the negative run rates.
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