An Indian civil engineer has complained about bias within cricket's governing body after his rival method to the Duckworth-Lewis (D/L) system for rain-affected games was rejected. V. Jayadevan, who invented the "VJD system" as a different way to calculate revised targets in truncated one-day and Twenty20 games, said the International Cricket Council (ICC) had failed to give his version a fair hearing.
The ICC on Friday announced it had considered Jayadevan's method in detail but unanimously agreed to stick to the Duckworth-Lewis system as it had no obvious flaws and that VJD was not an improvement. "That review was a very shallow and pre-meditated one," Jayadevan wrote in a protest letter to outgoing ICC president Sharad Pawar that has been seen by AFP.
Jayadevan accused an unnamed ICC expert of being biased against his system and he called on Pawar, a fellow Indian, to seek an independent review. "There was virtually no attempt to find out whether there were any shortcomings in the D/L system," he wrote. "On the other hand, the expert deliberately exaggerated a few small and rectifiable shortcomings in the VJD system.
"I have no hesitation in saying that the said expert's strong favouritism to the D/L system deprives the ICC from getting the best available method." Jayadevan received support from batting legend Sunil Gavaskar, on whose recommendation the VJD system has been used in Indian domestic cricket since 2007 - though not in the Indian Premier League. "In all fairness ICC should have tried the Jayadevan method for a year, like they do with trial laws, and then decided," the former India captain wrote in his syndicated column on Sunday.
The D/L system, devised by English statisticians Frank Duckworth and Tony Lewis, was first introduced at the international level in 1996. Some observers have suggested Jayadevan's campaign represents the latest efforts of India - now cricket's most influential country - to challenge England, the former colonial power and inventor of the game.
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