The 1992 World Cup rain rule that asked for 22 runs off one ball
South Africa needed 23 runs from 13 balls in a World Cup semi-final. Then came a ten-minute shower, and when play resumed the scoreboard demanded 22 from a single delivery. That absurd moment buried a well-meant formula and eventually gave cricket the Duckworth-Lewis method.
Organisers of the 1992 tournament in Australia and New Zealand had tried to fix an old problem. Under the previous system, a team chasing a shortened target simply got the first side's run rate multiplied by its available overs, which was thought to favour the chasers. The new Most Productive Overs method instead counted only the first team's best overs. If rain left the chasing side with 44 overs, it had to beat the total of its opponent's 44 highest-scoring overs.
It sounded fair until rain arrived mid-chase. In the England against South Africa semi-final, the overs deducted were England's cheapest ones, including a maiden, so the balls vanished while almost none of the runs did. Batting second during an interruption became a heavy handicap, overcome only once all tournament. The rule was dropped for one-day internationals in Australia afterwards, and Duckworth-Lewis took over from the 1999 World Cup. The statistician Bill Frindall reckoned that method would have left South Africa needing four to tie or five to win off that last ball.
The tournament broke other ground as well. It was the first World Cup in the Southern Hemisphere, the first with coloured clothing, white balls, black sight screens and floodlit matches, and the first to include South Africa, readmitted after 21 years of exclusion over apartheid. A full round-robin replaced the old qualifying groups.
Co-hosts New Zealand, led by Martin Crowe, surprised everyone by winning their first seven games, partly through crafty tactics such as opening the bowling with the spinner Dipak Patel and sending pinch hitters in first. Both their defeats came against Pakistan, the second in the semi-final, where Inzamam-ul-Haq hit 60 off 37 balls. In the final at the MCG, played on a Wednesday, Imran Khan scored 72 and Pakistan beat England by 22 runs for their first title.
Source: 1992 Cricket World Cup
