Do away with Archaic ICC Rules

The recently concluded World Cup Cricket tournament’s final tie breaker game has thrown up a few confusing questions. Though England was declared the winners owing to the outcome of superior number of boundaries scored at the time of a tied super over, there seems to be some discontent regarding the basis of declaration of winners for the title in a tied game.

The overthrow controversy of 6 runs during super over and ICC’s rule of 19.3 regarding overthrows needs to be rectified through a formal announcement by the ICC, of late. The teams, critics and cricket fraternity are still unconvinced the way the winners were declared in the first-ever World Cup tie breaker post the super over match. As also the argument of joint winner declaration in case of a tie though valid will steer away the real excitement of seeing a single claimant to the World Cup title.

It is high time the ICC set aside clear instructions to declare a winner on the basis of performance metrics as made available than going by an archaic rule of superior boundaries or on the basis of a superior over, especially in crucial matches during finals. It is now important for the ICC to amend necessary rules to declare the tie match results in favour of only a high net run rate scoring teams amongst other frameworks and clear the air of confusion to cricket fans. The archaic Duckworth Lewis method of calculating runs during a weather affected match too needs an immediate overhaul by the experts aided by ICC.

Varun Dambal,

Bangalore.