The Aussies are beginning to look ominous

Well, that was quick. We knocked off early from training last night to catch the second half of the 1st innings and all of the 2nd. Got to the bar and Australia are 0/8. Great we think, didn’t miss anything. Then realised Australia were already chasing. Bugger.

I don’t know Michael. Who’d have thought that Zimbabwe could have beaten Australia? And the other night in the NZ-England match, I didn’t think NZ had a chance in hell of winning- but they did in the last minute. I think a lot of these T20 matches are a lot closer and less predictable than most ODIs.

Andrew, you might be right about Australia not wanting to play because they’ve got face to lose and nothing much to gain. But that doesn’t mean this is a game with a future. I think that will depend most of all on whether the game is ‘broken’; that is, heavily weighted to the team batting first or second. Even those who just want lots of big hitting are going to get over this game pretty quickly if it comes down to the coin toss. And for all we know so far, it might be broken, because even shorter game lengths would *definitely* make the set/chase distinction matter a great deal. For instance, in the extreme, but luckily fictitious, case of One1 cricket, in which each side gets an innings of one ball, it’s clearly enormously advantageous to go second and know whether or not you have to try a risky shot.

Up to about September 15 in this Twenty20 tournament, the chasing team was winning games at a 3-1 rate (in both the Zim and Bangla upsets, the winner chased, and at least in the Oz-Zim game, the setting team was clearly unsure how to go about the job - didn’t see the other game so I can’t tell about that one). Moreover, in the 3 games in that period where the chasing team lost, it was seriously outgunned by the setting team (respectively, the losing chasers were Scotland vs Pak, Zim vs England, and Kenya vs Sri Lanka). At that point it all looked very one dimensional.

But arguably those results were skewed by temporary confusion early in the tournament about what an appropriate score should be. You’d expect uncertainty about that to heavily favour the chasing team, since they can at least bat to a clear plan and pace themselves. In the last week, when people have had enough experience to be a bit more confident about judging appropriate scores to aim for, the setting team has won two thirds of the games.

Of course, the sample of international games is still tiny. It’ll be interesting to see if the win ratio between setter and chaser keeps around roughly 50-50 once there are two or three times as many international games on the books. If it doesn’t, they might have to tweak things.