Unthinkable? Not giving a toss

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jan/03/unthinkable-not-giving-toss-ashes

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In Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Tom Stoppard's characters are discovered tossing coins. Rosencrantz always calls "heads" and always wins, pocketing 92 times the coin with which Guildenstern has supplied him. Yet as Stoppard explains in a stage direction: Guildenstern is not worried about the money; only about the "implications". Until the final Test of his woeful series in Australia, the England captain Alastair Cook must have been feeling a bit of a Guildenstern: four tosses lost out of four; four Test matches likewise. He may well lose the fifth; but at least he's now shown he can win a toss. Despite the rise of sports statisticians, the "implications" here have been little investigated. Yet in England's triumph over Australia last summer, Cook won every match where he won the toss, and this winter he has lost every match where he lost it. In an age when sport increasingly resorts to technological gizmos designed to ensure greater fairness, others may echo the thought of the Guardian's cricket correspondent, Mike Selvey, at Melbourne: "The toss, too, appears to be playing more of a part than it perhaps ought." One remedy would be to have only one toss, at the start of a series. The subsequent choice would alternate between captains. In a series with an odd number of games there'd still be some advantage for the captain who was first to make the right call. But it would at least help ensure that future contests were more securely located on that hallowed utopian ground, the level playing field.

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