ICC Cricket World Cup - Part 4

First topic message reminder :

Yes, England expected to be unchanged. Long boundaries apparently, which will suit England's excellent running ability!

If there were a decent replacement in the wings, I think Rashid's place would be under severe threat. He's got figures of 7/403 from 69 overs in the World Cup so far, which is hardly illuminating stuff.

New Zealand fell apart when they lost Williamson in the last game. Now they're imploding again. 69/4 after Taylor takes on an ill-advised run.

This is going to be two consecutive comprehensive victories over fellow semi-finalists for England, which is a hell of a confidence boost.

One unlucky run out followed by one silly one...

Think this is looking beyond the Kiwis now. Root coming on to apply more pressure

I might get a - relatively - early night : surely England can't mess it up from here ?

Taylor now run out as well. The RRR is over 7.

Did England order a longer pitch to make these runouts possible?

VTR wrote:Did England order a longer pitch to make these runouts possible?

Don't think it mattered for the Williamson one - that was the secret electro-magnet in Mark Wood's fingers...

For Taylor it was simply that the fielder that looked like Adil Rashid was actually Jimmy Anderson in disguise, hence the arm.

Graeme Swann thinks Root may be on to help the over rate and stop Morgan missing the semi-final, but it also might be because there are two left handers at the crease.

Rashid on at the other end and he always seems to prefer bowling with another spinner, so maybe that has something to do with it as well.

Duty281 wrote:New Zealand fell apart when they lost Williamson in the last game. Now they're imploding again. 69/4 after Taylor takes on an ill-advised run.

This is going to be two consecutive comprehensive victories over fellow semi-finalists for England, which is a hell of a confidence boost.

Yeah the confidence will be back. Have to say the luck has run for England in these games ; but they are in the position they'd planned for - more or less : need to win two matches against tough opponents . Which was always going to be the final contract . No certainties ; but they won't fear anyone.

Would be nice if Rashid could find some form with the ball...he's had an awful WC so far. You'd think NZ will have a go at him , so...

Rashid has been really poor. I wonder if he doesn't take any wickets today there's a case for dropping him, he's a bit of a passenger at the moment. Would be a big call that one!

Rashid's first two overs go for 19. Root going much better at the lefties from his opening two, only conceding 8.

I hope they keep Rashid on for a little bit, give him a chance to bowl himself into a bit of form. But if he keeps going for 9/10 an over they'll have to bring back one of the seamers.

VTR wrote:Rashid has been really poor. I wonder if he doesn't take any wickets today there's a case for dropping him, he's a bit of a passenger at the moment. Would be a big call that one!

Wouldn't be impossible. Improve the batting - on paper anyway .But they probably wouldn't want Moeen and Root both bowling similar stuff.
It is a worry with the big games to come. Pity they never tried Dawson out in the round robin ?

VTR wrote:Rashid has been really poor. I wonder if he doesn't take any wickets today there's a case for dropping him, he's a bit of a passenger at the moment. Would be a big call that one!

Athers mentioned on comms during the India game that he's already had three injections in his shoulder this summer already, does make you wonder at what point they accept it's causing him too much grief and give him time off.

Rashid is off after two overs, Plunkett back on.

It's a shame if he is injured but in that case we should have given him some time off.

Just watching the Taylor run out again. Interesting to see Plunkett had bowled 3 dots in a row before Taylor pushed hard for a two that wasn't there.

Wood back on at the other end so our brief spell of spin is over completely.

Morgan may have to go back to his spinners later, or he could try and get some overs out if Stokes if he thinks pace is the way to go. Good options to have for the England captain.

Yes, I'd take the real Rashid in the team all day, but he looks injured and if he can't get the usual revs on the ball, it's absolute cannon fodder. Moeen has at least bowled steadily so far, though obviously his batting has been utterly brainless. Dawson too much of a risk now

The way things stand it is looking very much that the table will finish up as:
1) Australia
2) India
3) England
4) NZ (with an unassailable average run rate compared to what Pakistan can achieve)

So I assume the Semi-final line up will be Australia vs NZ & India vs England.

It would be a lot easier to rest Rashid if Moeen had been playing well. The strange thing is his dodgy shoulder most likely earned a wicket by tempting that suicide run, NZ had clearly got a premeditated plan to push for runs when Rashid was the fielder.
Another thing that could count against Moeen is that hes bowling essentially the same as root. I guess that could open the door for Dawson but I just dont think hes good enough at anything to deserve a place in the squad. We said right from the start Rashid is the hardest player to loose ( turned out in the absence of Hales it was actually Roy)
Leggies in general have not had the expected impact a d taken the kind of hauls we have seen in games over the past few years. So its maybe not as bad as it could have been if he does have to get rested or dropped.
They at least have a decent break coming up

Should add, we are not there yet. Massive favourites still but some friendly bowling has allowed a partnership to get going

No name Bertie wrote:The way things stand it is looking very much that the table will finish up as:
1) Australia
2) India
3) England
4) NZ (with an unassailable average run rate compared to what Pakistan can achieve)

So I assume the Semi-final line up will be Australia vs NZ & India vs England.

Short of a miraculous NZ win from here or Australia bombing the South Africa game, that will be right.

Australia vs NZ at Old Trafford on Tuesday
India vs England at Edgbaston on Thursday

Why isn't Ben Stokes being used as a bowler?

What kind of scheduling gives one team two more days rest than the other? Usual rubbish from the ICC

Duty281 wrote:13/8 with SkyBet that the heavyweight trio of England, India and Australia all make the semi-final.

Arguably the kindest gift a bookmaker has ever bestowed on the humble punter.

It was astoundingly generous, though England made heavier weather of getting through than I would have liked!

VTR wrote:What kind of scheduling gives one team two more days rest than the other? Usual rubbish from the ICC

Reserve day I believe, and they want to keep the games completely separate.

Stokes ...one ball...one wicket... NZ 128/6.

This is done. Good night all ...

Ah yes, reserve days. Thankfully they aren't looking likely to be needed!

Australia will be strong favourites for their semi-final. NZ on a terrible run now - scraped past South Africa and the West Indies, before being comfortably beaten by both Australia and England. Aussies currently on a 5-match winning run; all games in which they've batted first.

The second semi-final will be a lot closer. England narrow favourites because they appear to be peaking at the right time and they love playing at Edgbaston!

I'm interested to see how India go against Bangladesh and if they can figure out a better ballance and middle order.
We might see Jadeja for the return fixture, and a side with a different plan to negate England.

It does seem that the toss has been very important. Teams have struggled to chase, best in mind how great zengland had been in recent years at having down any total...they have struggled in this tournament.
The fashion at the start was for sides to bowl first, about 20 games in that flipped to sides electing to bat 2/3s of the time.
It's been a very interesting world cup to see tactics evolve. Another benefit if a format that gives sides time to learn and adapt, rather than a bunch of pointless games against minnows in early small groups.

One thing I dont like is the NRR seemingly stopping teams bothering to try for miracle wins and instead batting out to protect it best they can as seems to be the case with NZs crawl here.
Maybe head to head results should be the primary consideration in deciding tied placings.

I said before England blew the tournament open by losing to Sri Lanka that NZ could come unstuck in the last 5 games and make things interesting, and had Braithwaite got another couple of degrees elevation he would have completed a miracle comeback and NZ would now be looking at crashing out the tournament, rather than consolidating their semi final position by damage limitation batting.

The commentators on TMS are pretty scathing on NRR (mainly Andy Zaltsman who actually understands NRR) and proposing alternative solutions. Essentially the NZ vs Sri Lanka game and the Pakistan vs West Indies game are playing disproprtionately large parts in the NRR calculation.

That review by Santner was the most optimistic of the entire tournament!

I must admit the workings of NRR escape me but I understand that it's not always fairly representing the true margin of wins in the way a DLS difference would.
To me though any system that encourages sides to think about not losing by too much rather than trying to win even from near death ( as England did a couple of years ago 8 down, with 70 off runs to get) robs individual matches of their drama.

This is why I favour results between the teams I think. Because if you lose by 1 run or lose by 100 runs it makes no difference in the final reckoning. The only thing to play for in either game is the win and there is a double jeopardy that you might just not lose out on points but also results between the teams.

My second separator would be a bonus point system. So for the winning side only something along the lines of if you win by over 30 runs or chase with 10% of the allocated overs left then you get a bonus point. This would mean a team who dominated the first innings of a game would have incentive to push on and finish a big win, and it rewards a team with a number if big wins over a team with the same number if narrow wins. The only issue is with teams having different numbers of games due to no results.

Then my final separator would be a DLS goal difference type system instead of NRR. Hopefully by pushing this further down the line it's not really a consideration, but it's better to have something that a a fairly continuous scale before you get to lots.

It's all nicely set up for Pakistan to blast the magical 500 score, then bowl Bangladesh out for 100-odd!

Trying to work the calculations out on my phone calculator and not my trusty excel sheet:

Pakistan need to go at a run rate of 6.944 BETTER than Bangladesh to overhaul NZ. This roughly rally’s with my calculations earlier so I’ll run with it.


That is to say if they bat first over 50 overs they need to win by 348 runs. So if they win the toss and it’s a road they need to bat first and they’ll probably need 500.

If there’s a bit of something in the pitch, their best option is to bowl first and try and dismiss Bangladesh cheaply. This is because whatever Bangladesh score will be, for NRR purposes, treated as though it took 50 overs. So if Bangladesh score 100ao from 20, that’s a run rate of 2, even though they actually went at 5s. This means Pakistan will need to get their 100 at 9s (2 + 6.944) - so in 11 overs. The real advantage of doing it this way is that because it’s just a net run rate and no consideration of wickets, they can have a swing at everything and if they’re 101-9 after 11 overs then that will be good enough for the NRR swing, even though they wouldn’t have got to the 448 required to win by 348 runs if they had played out the 50.

So Pakistan’s best hope is to hope for a lively pitch, win the toss, bowl first and skittle Bangladesh. Failing that, bat first, score tons and hope Bangladesh lose interest.

Apparently Pakistan will have to win something like 400 to 84 to pass NZs NRR. This is Pakistan, so you cant rule it out. Or exactly the reverse score.

Preempting KPF I do feel todays score flattered England a bit. In batting first they had the opportunity to see how the pitch played and had better bowling plans early as a result. NZ also suffered hugely missing their best strike bowler. Once again they struggled against the left arm seamer, if they get around to facing Australia they will have to face a lot of them.
The run outs obviously played a part in how far short NZ fell too.

That aside its hard to see NZ challenging for the title based on the past few rounds. They have been "found out" to some extent and have been hugely reliant on Williamson for runs. Even with a fully fit bowling attack I dont fancy them that much.

As I said above I reckon India could be better set up to take England on at Edgbaston ( assuming that is the fixture). If they can sort out the middle order, keep bumrah fit and win the toss it may go very differently to last time.

Im erring toward an India Aus final, and frankly Im pretty pesimistic about England chances despite two big wins.

I fancy England’s chances in the semis. Whoever of the top 2 we get, we’ll be no worse than 45% even on a pessimistic day. We’ve been playing knock out cricket for the last week and we’re hitting form. I think even in a chase situation where we were set 350 we’d have a decent chance because we’d just have to go for it. And if Roy and Bairstow got off to a flyer we could actually put the team trying to defend under pressure because they’d be worried whether they had enough.

Ultimately we’re going to have to continue playing good cricket to have a hope and if we don’t, we won’t. But if we turn up for these games we’ve got a decent chance on home turf.

robbo277 wrote:Trying to work the calculations out on my phone calculator and not my trusty excel sheet:

Pakistan need to go at a run rate of 6.944 BETTER than Bangladesh to overhaul NZ. This roughly rally’s with my calculations earlier so I’ll run with it.


That is to say if they bat first over 50 overs they need to win by 348 runs. So if they win the toss and it’s a road they need to bat first and they’ll probably need 500.

If there’s a bit of something in the pitch, their best option is to bowl first and try and dismiss Bangladesh cheaply. This is because whatever Bangladesh score will be, for NRR purposes, treated as though it took 50 overs. So if Bangladesh score 100ao from 20, that’s a run rate of 2, even though they actually went at 5s. This means Pakistan will need to get their 100 at 9s (2 + 6.944) - so in 11 overs. The real advantage of doing it this way is that because it’s just a net run rate and no consideration of wickets, they can have a swing at everything and if they’re 101-9 after 11 overs then that will be good enough for the NRR swing, even though they wouldn’t have got to the 448 required to win by 348 runs if they had played out the 50.

So Pakistan’s best hope is to hope for a lively pitch, win the toss, bowl first and skittle Bangladesh. Failing that, bat first, score tons and hope Bangladesh lose interest.

Don’t think Pakistan would be able to affect the nrr enough if they bat second. Chasing a target down in 9 overs in the example above wouldn’t have enough of an effect on the batting side of the nrr equation to alter it sufficiently. They would have to bat first and make a monster score and then bowl Bangladesh out for a low one so that an extra fifty overs at the high run rate would be added and not just nine or ten.

yeah i read on the bbc website before that if bangeldesh bat first pakistan are out

If they bowl out Bangadesh for 0 in 10 balls does that break the calculation?

No, by my calculations they'd have to hit 51 off the 1st ball of their innings to get through (maybe if it were Bangladesh requiring 51 off 1 ball against Pakistan it would be achievable depending on what the bookmakers dictated).

Though if the first ball of the Pakistan innings were a no-ball they'd only require 48 (including the run for the no-ball) so you never know.

Do you have a link to that story on the bbc? Just checked one of the cricket stories and couldn’t see it.

I don’t see where the maths falls down, unless there is an element of NRR I’m missing. But you can make NRR gains if you bat first or second, so I don’t see how it could rule them out.

If they get a run rate of 9 and Bangladesh get an effective run rate of 2 then that will be a net run rate of 7. If you multiply out their average (-.792 x 7 completed games = -5.5) add their 7 (1.5) and divide by 8 (just under 0.2) that beats New Zealand’s new NRR of 0.1something.

It's taken over all the overs they've batted rather than adding together the run rates from each game.

Scoring at 9 an over for 50 overs increases the run rate by more than scoring 9 an over for 2 overs.

Net Run Rate = (Total Runs Scored/ Total Overs Faced)-(Total Runs Conceded/Total Overs Bowled). noting that if bowled out a team is deemed to have faced 50 overs.

robbo277 wrote:Do you have a link to that story on the bbc? Just checked one of the cricket stories and couldn’t see it.

I don’t see where the maths falls down, unless there is an element of NRR I’m missing. But you can make NRR gains if you bat first or second, so I don’t see how it could rule them out.

If they get a run rate of 9 and Bangladesh get an effective run rate of 2 then that will be a net run rate of 7. If you multiply out their average (-.792 x 7 completed games = -5.5) add their 7 (1.5) and divide by 8 (just under 0.2) that beats New Zealand’s new NRR of 0.1something.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/live/cricket/47483828

18.31- Andy Zaltzman

Test Match Special statistician

The absolute key for Pakistan is to win the toss because if they bowl first - even if they bowl Bangladesh out for nought they couldn't overtake on run-rate. They have to bat first and score 480, then bowl out Bangladesh for 160, they need to win by about 320 runs.

also on there was a helpful breakdown

To qualify, Pakistan must:

Beat Bangladesh by 311 runs after scoring 350
Beat Bangladesh by 316 runs after scoring 400
Beat Bangladesh by 321 runs after scoring 450

Incidentally. The biggest ODI win in history was by 290 runs.

Galted wrote:It's taken over all the overs they've batted rather than adding together the run rates from each game.

Scoring at 9 an over for 50 overs increases the run rate by more than scoring 9 an over for 2 overs.

OK I get that but it also has an effective RR claculation where a sides bowled out, so getting bowled out for 0 would be a RR of 0 for 50 overs against. If they then came out and hit a first ball 6 wouldnt that be a positive run rate for one over of 36?
If that doesnt go into the overall calculation to be a much as winning by 300 or so in a 50 over match batting first then the system is broken.

Someone call Zaltman

Anyway none of this will happen. Pakistan can feel a bit hard done by on the effects of rain rather than the NRR calculations. NZ most likely dodged a bullet against India, we dont know for sure of course but India would've been favourites for that. Pakistan also had their game against Sri Lanka rained off which they wouldve been favourites to win. Pakistan of course won the head to head game between the two.
If they do win the game against Balngladesh then Pakistan can hold their heads high on the tournament. They've had some bad days (notably their first match which has played large part in borking their NRR) but have from somewhere found a gear and a mentality to live up to their potential. Given how god awful they had been (losing streak off 12 games I think) it really wasnt expected they'd be unlucky to miss out on the knock outs. The talents always been there (despite Nathaniels disparging remarks, their top 4 are good batsmen) even if they don't quite have complete side.

Although its been a lot more interesting than it looked like being the rain, especially that India NZ game, really did limit the chances of sides like Pakistan making a late charge. As did England moving the stands of course.

Yes now you mention it that does ring a bell. Let me just backtrack and delete all my previous posts...

compelling and rich wrote:

The absolute key for Pakistan is to win the toss because if they bowl first - even if they bowl Bangladesh out for nought they couldn't overtake on run-rate.

This proves that the NRR system is broken.

If you're the Bangladesh captain and win the toss, what do you do?

Goose

Because there have been 7 completed games already the calculation will break down something like (example numbers):

For - 2000 runs in 350 overs RR 5.71
Against - 2200 runs in 350 overs RR 6.29
Net run rate -0.58

If they bowl them out for 0 they won’t concede any extra runs but they can put 50 extra overs into their against column. However they can then only put 6 runs and 1 ball into the for column. So:

For - 2006 runs in 350.16 overs RR 5.73
Against - 2200 runs in 400 overs RR 5.5
NRR - 0.23

So although they can improve their “against” run rate bowling first and bowling them out cheaply, they then can’t have enough impact on their for run rate to increase the NRR above New Zealand’s.

Contrast that to batting first and hitting 400:

For - 2400 runs in 400 overs RR 6

Then bowling out Bangladesh for a low score could mean they improve both sides of the calculation.

JuliusHMarx wrote:If you're the Bangladesh captain and win the toss, what do you do?

tricky one

choose to bat and play a despondent Pakistan team with nothing to play for

or

bowl and play a over aggressive batting line up that may give easy wickets away