A new Net Resource Factor Based Alternative Method to Calculate Revised Target in Interrupted One Day Cricket Matches

Abstract

This paper proposes an alternative method to calculate the revised target in interrupted 50 overs One Day international (ODI) cricket matches. Existing Duckworth Lewis (D/L) method and its modified versions only take available batting resources of the batting team into account and ignore the individual player’s excellence to calculate the revised target. Here, it is worth mentioning that individual player’s excellence varies in reality, and therefore quality of the available resources may affect the revised target significantly. Further in D/L method, revised target calculation depends only on the available batting resources of the batting team and does not consider the available bowling resources of the fielding team. Proposed method overcomes these two shortcomings by taking individual player’s excellence and available bowling resources of the fielding team into account. Individual player’s excellence has been determined by Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA), a well-known non parametric mathematical programming technique. A new idea of “Net Resource Factor” has been introduced to capture both batting and bowling resources to calculate the revised target. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to incorporate the ability of individual players and bowling resources of the fielding team for calculating the revised target. A comparative analysis between the proposed method and D/L method has been carried out using the data of real ODI matches held in the past. To facilitate ground application of the proposed method, a flow chart and a “Net Resource Factor Table” have been designed.