the scottish way

Scotland’s cricket team is not necessarily all that Scottish – although it’s probably more so than England’s is English right enough – but last month they did the most Scottish thing imaginable. In an eight-team group of qualifiers for the World Twenty20, comprising 28 matches over an entire fortnight, they botched their chances of reaching the finals by one single run. Needing to finish third in the section to get the ‘easy’ route through the playoffs, they came fourth and ultimately missed their hurl in the World Cup wheelbarrow by that mathematical minefield known as Net Run Rate: Nepal ranked above them by taking it down to the fourth decimal place, meaning that had the Scots scored one run more, or conceded one fewer, in any of their seven contests, it would have been them climbing the qualification Everest.

Now none of this may be particularly interesting to those of you for whom cricket equals Englishmen waiting for it to stop raining. But it turned this correspondent’s mind to sport’s myriad weird and wonderful ways of breaking ties. When the contest exists to produce a winner and a loser, what do we do when it’s a draw?

Football is no great leader in this respect. We have alternated many ways of tiebreaking, in both cup and league formats, and the only one which has really universally stuck is the penalty shoot out. It’s rubbish – it’s barely more of a representation of the beautiful game’s skills than a crossbar challenge – but it’s the best we can do. It certainly beats the lot-drawing, coin-tossing or endless replays that preceded its invention, although one still hankers after the old summer gala 5-a-side format of awarding drawn games to the team who got most corners. Ingenious 10-year-olds could often be seen intentionally firing shots directly at opposing defenders’ backsides, for the chances of getting a deflection over the by-line were infinitely higher than those of squeezing the ball into the infeasibly small homemade goals.

Our leagues, too, have wrestled with the quandary of how to separate sides who have finished a campaign level on points: you’ve got your goal difference, your goals scored, your goal average – arithmetically convoluted cousin of Net Run Rate – head-to-head records, or Uefa’s brain-busting subtract-the-results-against-the-worst-team conundrum. With so many possible scenarios it’s hard not to feel sorry for South Africa’s 2012 Cup of Nations squad, who vibrantly celebrated their qualification on goal difference only to learn that they weren’t using goal difference any more and they were, sadly, tatties.

At least those rules, though, are relatively straightforward had Bafana Bafana actually read them. The NFL’s awesomely complex procedures – all 1175 words of them – are a sight to behold; the upshot is that where two teams have won the same number of matches (in a season of just 16, where ties are virtually outlawed), your placing will likely come down to your “strength of schedule”, ie how good were the 13 teams you played against. It leaves the mind-melting possibility of teams not only needing to win their last game but also to hope a heap of other teams do too, so their fixture list is deemed to have been more difficult. It’s no wonder all the players take Ritalin, it must take inhuman concentration to figure out where you are.

Formula 1 has its “countback” system, where drivers equal on championship points are ranked in order of who has most race wins, but given that the corollary to that is that they must also have dropped the most points elsewhere it is effectively giving victory to the one who’s had most accidents. Perhaps if they called it that in the first place it’d spice the sport up a bit.

So there is no tiebreak needed to see which sport has the best idea. Tennis. What must have been the most soul-sapping, interminable spectacle in the days of never-ending sets now has not only a way of separating the inseparable but a fabulously tense, climactic blizzard of huge points. It’s like a penalty shoot out, except Aberdeen don’t lose them. Sounds like a winner to me.