Let's help them

More than a decade of the D/L system, we can safely say that the majority of the cricketing world including spectators don't understand it. We have now reconfirmed what we knew earlier, that even identifying the winning score is a tough job. So it is time for fans to come up with creative ideas to help teams.

So I have seriously come up with some:

- Build an application, that senses that captain or coach is about to do something crazy -- it needs to send out a high pitched shriek, like a car alarm, that is to warn all in the vicinity of impending disaster. It would be wasted to build a system that just computes the current score, the alert system prior to the wrong action is imperative.

- Automatic chopper - that will chop away pieces of the paper that are no longer relevant -- so that you don't look at columns for earlier overs or lesser wickets.

- Have a D/L chief strategist - has to be part meteorologist and will assess the ground conditions, light situation, weather conditions, team capabilities and come up with a detailed strategy for each match. While this goes beyond identifying the right score, it is obviously not fool proof either, because it needs to be communicated to the players in the middle.

-So hire a speedy runner to run in between overs, communicating to the players important messages like - "if either of you plan to get out, you will need 10 runs in this over, if neither of you get out, you will need only 1".

-The above is also problematic, as the runner may forget the numbers and send a different message, so the last solution is to hire either Duckworth or Lewis to be in your team -- to compute and identify the right score and communicate it. And if that fails and the team feels done in by the D/L method (rightly or wrongly), a D/L chase can have a new meaning.