It’s time for NRR… but NRR isn’t much fun in a T20 tournament because there’s so little room for nrrdling

2 minute read
We love nrrdling (the wildly unambitious art of hitting to make defeat a little less awful, as it increases your chances of advancing to the next stage of the tournament if your team finishes level with another team). It’s not really a thing in T20 though. Due to the limited nature of the format, the way you hit to make defeat a little less devastating is almost exactly the way you would hit if you were still actively trying to win. There is nothing to enjoy about that.

A very good number – something like Marnus Labuschagne’s 46 off 74 balls in the 2023 50-over World Cup – is completely disconnected from the supposed goal of a second batsman, trying to score enough runs to actually win. That’s the thrill of this endeavor: watching a professional athlete behave in such a way that he seems completely oblivious to his central goal.

The whole point of playing international sport is to try to win. To see someone perform in a way where he or she is actively making victory less likely with each song produces a 1.21 gigawatt electric false contradiction.

We love it. Seeing an international sports team with a completely legitimate reason for aiming so low makes our hearts sing. Feel the tension!

As such, we were momentarily relieved to learn that a net run rate (NRR) situation is emerging in Group 1 of the Super 8s stage of this T20 World Cup. India got hammered by South Africa and their NRR is not good and now there is a chance of them finishing level with someone. Huzzah!

But then we thought a bit about NRR scenarios and it is actually extremely unlikely that we will have a situation where a batter wants to take singles to maintain or improve his team’s NRR. It just doesn’t work that way in this format. Totals are smaller, innings are shorter. By the time defeat is inevitable, you generally only have a handful of balls left to play with, so you might as well try to hit them for four or six anyway.

We must now conclude with an apology: we’ve somehow never seen Revenge of the Nerds. Considering the death of Robert Carradine earlier this week, this article absolutely screams out for a Revenge of the Nrrds reference. Maybe someone can contribute something appropriate in the comments section.

(We’re pretty sure you’re not supposed to have favorite lines in the obituaries of people who just committed suicide, but if it were acceptable, we’d go with The Guardian: “Carradine spent time undercover at the University of Arizona trying to convince real students that he was a real nerd.”)