Stephen Fleming asks to introduce "wicket pressure" in a rain curtailed T20 game

The eliminator match between the Kolkata Knight Riders and the Sunrisers Hyderabad went into the wee hours of Thursday morning as Ishank Jaggi struck the winning runs at 1:30 am in the morning. The Chinnaswamy crowd was more or less empty when the match ended with some of the younger generation remaining till the last ball was bowled. It will be hard to remember a previous incident when the match ended at 2 in the morning.

Head coach of Rising Pune Supergiant Stephen Fleming was of the opinion that the rules of D/L must be changed for a T20 game as it gets heavily loaded in favour of the team batting 2

After restricting Hyderabad to 128, KKR had to wait around 3 hours to bat again. They came out to bat at 12:55 with a revised target of 48 in 6 overs. Despite the fall of 3 early wickets, the chase of 48 wasn’t going to be threatening as KKR chased the total down quite comfortably in the end with Gauti playing a captain’s knock. Fleming conceded that the D/L method is efficient in the 50 overs format but not in a T20 overs game.

D/L method is satisfactory for a 50 overs game but not for a T20

“The D/L method is satisfactory for 100 overs, but in a 40-over game, it simply favours the team batting second too much. With low-scoring games on difficult pitches, whenever the overs are reduced, the team batting second will always have an edge because they stand a far lower chance of being bowled out, so they can stay a lot more relaxed,” Fleming was quoted as saying by the Times of India.

“In a situation like Wednesday night, even though there has been a small increase in runs required and there’s pressure on the team batting second owing to a reduction in the number of overs, they still have all wickets in hand which means they can play without risk. Even losing three wickets in approximately one over doesn’t really hamper them; they know they can just keep going because they have plenty of batting resources to fall back on.”

“The whole scenario just isn’t ideal and definitely needs a bit of tweaking. One of the ideas floating around is to introduce ‘wicket pressure’, so if you have a small chase, then you also have fewer wickets to play with. In effect, that means you only have five wickets, for example, for a six-over chase.”

Late Night finishes are a concern

As per the IPL rules in 2017, if a match is abandoned during the playoffs, the team finishing higher on the points table would have emerged victorious. The cut off time is also increased for the playoffs with the regulations allowing a 5 over match to start as late as 12:58 pm. There was a provision for a super over also which needed to start by 1:20 am.

“The late-night finishes are a concern. Shah Rukh Khan, the Knight Riders franchise co-owner] has tweeted about the option of a reserve day. We will weigh all options and the IPL governing council will look into it,” Rajiv Shukla was quoted as saying by Times of India. Gambhir also expressed his concern and said he felt sorry for the Sunrisers.

Gambhir felt sorry for the Sunrisers

“I felt sorry for Sunrisers. I hope someone takes note of rain-affected matches and comes up with a plan B,” the KKR captain wrote in his column for the New Indian Express. Kallis and Nathan Coulter-Nile said it was crazy to see the winning runs get hit at 1:30 in the morning.

Gambhir also said that if it was any other venue in the world, the match would have been done and dusted and Sunrisers would have gone through. “Any other venue in India, with that amount of rain, it would have been game, set and match Sunrisers,” he said.