This came up in some thread today, and among all the comments that NRR favored sides batting first, and how Pakistan could have been eliminated from a coin toss, I started to think, what are ways we can make the coin toss more fair? I'm not going to claim how significant a coin toss is. Older posts such as this one and this article cover it better than I'll bother to.
What isn't very controversial is that winning the toss is better than losing it. And occasionally, it becomes quite important. I think that in tournaments such as this, the coin toss process should really be improved. We're seeing an emergence of "bat first, win" in many of these matches. I also remember one IPL (two years ago? Idk) when the chasing teams won way more often than the setting teams. So how can the inherent unfairness in the coin toss be "fixed"? These are some options I've heard thrown around, but I'd love to hear other people's ideas on this topic!
I. A Bidding System
This one's my favorite, because it creates a fascinating metagame. Basically, each captain privately tells the umpire what they'd like to do, and the amount of runs they'd sacrifice for it. If both teams want the same, the captain with the higher bid wins.
Let's say Team A and Team B both want to bat first. A bids 15 runs, while B bids 20 runs. Then B gets to bat first, but in the next innings, A starts with 20 runs for free.
If Team A wants to bat and Team B wants to bowl, the bids become irrelevant since each team just gets what they want.
II. Worse Team Chooses
Could be an interesting choice for a league system with a points table. In this system, a coin toss only occurs for each team's first match. After that, the lower ranked team on the table always gets to choose whether to bat or field first. This would prevent a team who sucks at one of those to luck their way to the top. Then for knockout rounds, the better team gets to choose as their reward for finishing higher on the table.
III. Away Team Chooses
For something like the IPL, where there are well-defined home and away teams, you could have it fixed beforehand that the away (or home) team always chooses. Then every team gets a set number of matches where they "win the toss". Again in knockout rounds, you could favor the higher-up team.
IV. Split-Innings
This would probably only apply to ODIs, but you could split the innings in a baseball-esque way. Copied from
u/sherlock1001 today:
Here's an idea: the team that wins the toss choses who bats first but they only play for 25 overs. Then the other team comes in to bat and again bats for 25 overs. Then, the team that lost the toss gets to chose who bats first in the second "innings" of 25 overs each.
The second innings starts from where it was left off at the end of 25 overs: wickets, batsmen, bowler quotas etc.
But of course, all this is just wishful thinking, and who knows whether it would work or is even necessary anyway? Either way, I'd love to see things like this tried out because it's so unsatisfying to think that your team lost due to a toss (even though it's usually mostly themselves to blame). If y'all'fuqs here have any thoughts/opinions/ideas on this, fire away!
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