2 minute read
We adore nrrdling (the hugely unambitious art of batting to make defeat slightly less awful because it improves your chances of going through to the next stage of the tournament should your team finish level on points with another). It’s not really a thing in T20 though. Due to the constricted nature of the format, the way you bat to make defeat slightly less awful is pretty much exactly the way you’d bat when still actively trying to win. There’s nothing to enjoy in that.
A really good nrrdle – something like Marnus Labuschagne’s 46 off 74 balls in the 2023 50-over World Cup – is utterly detached from the supposed goal of a side batting second, which is trying to score enough runs to actually win. That’s the thrill of the endeavour: watching a professional sportsperson conduct themselves in such a way that they seem wholly unaware of their central purpose.
The whole point of playing international sport is trying to win. To watch someone perform in a way where they are actively making victory less likely with every nrrdled single therefore provides a 1.21 gigawatt bolt of electric wrong-headed contradiction.
We love it. Seeing an international sports team with a perfectly legitimate reason to aim so low just makes our heart sing. Feel the thrill!
As such, we were momentarily uplifted to learn that there is a net run rate (NRR) situation brewing in Group 1 of the Super 8s phase of this T20 World Cup. India got hammered by South Africa and their NRR is not good and now there is a chance they’ll finish level on points with someone. Huzzah!
But then we thought about NRR scenarios a bit and it is actually vanishingly unlikely that we’ll get a situation where a batter is looking to take singles to preserve or improve his team’s NRR. It just doesn’t work like that in this format. Totals are smaller, innings are shorter. By the time defeat is inevitable, you’ve generally only got a handful of balls left to play with, so you may as well try to hit them for four or six anyway.
We must now finish with an apology: we have somehow never once seen Revenge of the Nerds. Given Robert Carradine’s death earlier this week, this article is positively crying out for a Revenge of the Nrrds reference. Perhaps someone could contribute something appropriate in the comments section.
(We’re pretty sure you’re not meant to have favourite lines within the obituaries of people who’ve just killed themselves, but if it were acceptable, we’d go with The Guardian’s, “Carradine spent time undercover at the University of Arizona convincing real students he was an actual nerd.”)