There is nothing worse than sitting round in the club dressing room looking at the rain outside.
Players and officials have looked forward all week and then open the curtains on Saturday morning to find it raining.
Fortunately, most games were able to get some cricket played at the weekend, however very few started on time and the umpires then had some calculations to do.
Before the toss is made, the ground is in the hands of the captains who decided whether to play or not.
After that, it’s the umpires.
If the ground is declared fit, then they have to work out how many overs can be played and how many overs can a bowler bowl.
Bowlers' allocation of overs is reduced if play is not started on time at one fifth of the overs left to play.
Once started these over restrictions remain for the full game, even if play is stopped later on.
As to how many overs are played, if the first innings doesn’t start on time then an over is taken off each innings at a rate of seven and a half minutes, so if play doesn’t start until an hour has passed then 16 overs are lost, eight overs per side.
If the first innings is completed and play is interrupted in the second innings, the umpires have to calculate how much time is left to play for a 7.10pm finish.
This time is divided by three and three quarters to find how many overs are to be played.
Duckworth-Lewis-Stern comes into play if rain interrupts play once started.
It will set a new target for the first innings which some captains find it hard to get their minds round when the opposition have scored 120 and DLS says they are to chase 125 to win.
The reason behind this is that teams set out with a plan to bat out a certain number of overs and these are lost with rain interruptions, so DLS tries to balance things out by working out what they might have scored if they played the full quota of overs.
Thank goodness now DLS calculations are done electronically on the Play Cricket App or by using the laptop and Play Cricket scorer pro.
Before this, it had to be calculated manually and often took a long time.
Now, by pressing a few buttons, the targets are set along with the par score which gives captains an idea as to how they are progressing towards their target.
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