Duckworth Lewis doesn't work for 20/20!

Ok, I am talking Cricket, if you didn't know that then you should probably just move along.

England just lost to the West Indies in a rain affected 20/20 match. Every time I see a reduced 20/20 match, the target for the second innings just seems way too easy.

The duckworth lewis system was designed for 50 over matches, which have a minimum of 20 overs when reduced. However, 20/20 games are often reduced to just 5 overs. When the first innings is completed and the second innings reduced, duckworth lewis will set a target that is usually a bit higher than the run rate equivalent, to account for the fact that the last overs are usually higher scoring. When you are talking about a 50 over game reduced to 30 overs, this makes some sense. For a 20/20 match reduced to 5 overs a team with 10 wickets has almost zero risk and can just throw the bat at it.

England scored a pretty decent 191 in their 20 overs. 9.55 runs/over. West Indies target for the 6 overs was 60 (thats 10 runs/over, but if you're still reading this i'm sure you could work that out). Where's the risk in that? 10 wickets to score just slightly higher run rate for 6 overs only? I was surprised it went as close as it did!

Ronnie Irani suggested on Twitter that maybe your wickets should be reduced. So you have to score 60, but with only 5 wickets, which puts the risk back into the chase.

I think a combination of reducing wickets and just adjusting the duckworth lewis formula a bit to be more appropriate to such short matches would lead to much better, and fairer, 20/20 games.