A dilemma as old as T20 cricket: Running for running's sake and the last ball of the innings...

JARROD KIMBER: The last ball isn't like the others. You should be furious when you lose, but you should also know you did everything you could to win

Meg Lanning is furious. She's swiping her bat and her body tenses up. The Australian Women are in the semi-final of the 2020 World Cup, and they're struggling. The pitch is slowing Lanning down, and the rest of the players are departing too soon. They need every run.

Shabnail Ismail has just bowled a great over for only five, and in the final over Ayabonga Khaka has gone at a run a ball leading into her last delivery. The final one is a low straight full toss, and Lanning drags to leg, straight at the sweeper. She pushes hard for two, only to see there is no chance of her making it back safely, and Nicola Carey seems to call no to confirm it.

Lanning's anger is probably not at the lack of a second, but that she got a full toss and found the sweeper.

But she should be mad at the running. Because even though there's no chance of a run, a fumble was possible. And that is what Khaka did. But Australia couldn't take advantage as they weren't running. Why on the last ball of the innings would they not continue to run until they are out?

When the Australians bowled, with two balls left, South Africa needed 12 runs to win. Had they stolen one on that Khaka fumble, it would have already been game over, but South Africa still had a chance. Australia won by five runs, and it wasn't an issue.

But not running until the end has been an issue before. It occurred in a Pakistan Super League game from 2015 when Islamabad played Karachi early in the season. On the last ball Mohammad Sami hit one out to Ravi Bopara at deep midwicket, it was a simple one bounce pick up.

Because they were turning for two regardless, Bopara fumbled striving for the run out, that meant they took a third. There was essentially one run on offer. Yet going even though they knew they'd probably be run out turned it into a three. Islamabad won that match by two runs.

Dean Jones, Islamabad's then-coach, often used this example to get his team to continue running on the last ball.

So how often do teams not take the last ball chance? Well, no one's been keeping track. We can try to come up with an idea of roughly when the situation might arise. In the last three years in men's T20 cricket, there's been 1548 balls bowled at 19.6 on the first innings. Of those 353 were boundaries and 163 non run out wickets. That's 1032 deliveries with a run out chance, and it includes 137 run outs. So every 7.5 balls a batsman is run out off the last live ball.

^{Lanning batting at the Women's T20 World Cup}

Of course there are last balls where a batsman has got home, and the bails have been dislodged moments later. But even adding another 137 chances on, that's still 73% of the time where the opportunity is there. Teams dive in the field, batsmen put their throats on the line with scoops, cricketers play through injuries, and yet regularly we see teams not even try for the last run, they just give it up. 

These numbers are only a rough estimate, but anecdotally, think back to all the cricket you watch. You see it repeatedly; in small games that don't matter, and huge games that do.

There is another sport where something similar happens, basketball. Like limited overs cricket, you know you should have roughly the same amount of possessions as your opponent each game, so it's about how efficiently you use them.

Basketball's version of not running forever on the last ball is the half court shot, where a lot of players at the end of the first, second and third quarters won't take a heave from beyond halfway as it may damage their field goal percentage.

Here is Kevin Durant explaining it a few years ago to the Daily Thunder, "It depends on what I'm shooting from the field. First quarter if I'm 4-for-4, I let it go. Third quarter if I'm like 10-for-16, or 10-for-17, I might let it go. But if I'm like 8-for-19, I'm going to go ahead and dribble one more second and let that buzzer go off and then throw it up there. So it depends on how the game's going."

Not how the game is going, how his game is going. But as former NBA player Shane Battier once said, "We're judged on (shooting) percentages. I think they should take the heave out of the stat book. It's common sense." ESPN's Zach Lowe has also tried to push this creative bookkeeping way around the problem.

Not many half court heaves come off, in the 18/19 NBA season it was one every 33. But in cricket, you'd assume that if you ran on the last ball every time there would be the chance of probably an extra run for every ten opportunities. And at times perhaps more with overthrows.

The most obvious reason players don't run on the last ball is their average. That's why cricket fan Josh Thomson suggested on Twitter that a bit like the half-court heaves wouldn't count against the ballers, the last-ball run out wouldn't go against the batsman's average. This would mean that every final delivery could be a wicket, boundary or exciting run. It would stop the yawning moments when the ball is mishit straight to a fielder and the batting team jog one. Innings would end in a bang every time.

^{England's Dawid Malan}

It's a decent enough idea, but I can't see all the major places where cricket stats are kept universally agreeing with that, and if you didn't do that, you'd have players with different averages everywhere.

Of course at this point you may say, wait a minute, why don't they just keep running, who cares about your average, this is about winning the game. Well the people who do care are the ones whose careers and mortgages depend on them being selected. And players down the order have lower averages, so do you want to to lose one or two runs on the chance that you might help the team.

Some people will see this as a black-and-white issue, you always get the most you can for your team. And you often see tail enders who don't care running like madmen at the end. But it is those players who are paid for their average that worry a bit.

Take Dawid Malan, a late bloomer whose Test career didn't bite, and he's now desperate for a T20 career in his 30s. Against New Zealand he smashes a hundred from 48 balls, and for the last ball he's at the non striker's end. Sam Billings misses one, it goes through to the keeper, and Malan says no.

This is what Eoin Morgan said after the game, "If we get guys that are not running off the last ball of the game because they want to get a not out, there's something to address." England, the team that ticks all its boxes with its army of nerdy analysts and Eoin Morgan's details obsession, saw that as a missed opportunity, despite the fact they scored 241 and would win by 76 runs.

But when Malan was left out of T20Is in South Africa for Joe Denly, people kept pointing at Malan's average as the reason he should play ahead of Denly. For the record, Malan's T20I average is 52. If he'd been run out attempting that bye, it'd be 47. That probably wouldn't change the argument, but two run outs early in your career on that last ball could dent the overall mark. What England know, is that averages just don't mean as much in T20 as other formats, but we've grown up with them, and there's no widely used superior metric ready to replace them.

But while selfishness would be the main reason people are upset over this, it's not the only factor in why players aren't going harder. When I asked one cricketer why he hadn't run on the last ball, he said because he didn't want to hurt his team's net run rate. I told him that net run rate didn't involve wickets unless your team is bowled out. He looked confused.

^{Mitchell Santner at Lord's}

When this became an issue after the Australian women's last ball, many thought it had DLS connotations. It doesn't, once a first innings is completed, the wickets for that score are irrelevant.

So while some batsmen are looking after their records, others haven't been told to continue running. Those who notice are very passionate about it, but it's hardly a big story. But after what happened in the World Cup final, it probably should be.

The World Cup final was probably the greatest ODI match ever played. More runs have been scored in others, and there's been some great close games, but for narrative, farce, tension and the fact it's the World Cup final, it's hard to beat. And you know what you're thinking already, Stokes' path diverting dive, Boult and the rope, the last ball scramble, and then the super over run out.

There was another huge moment at the end of an innings of this game, that was bizarre when it happened, before being largely overlooked when more dramatic things occurred.

Mitch Santner's facing the last ball of New Zealand's innings, and Jofra Archer shocks him with a bouncer. Santner is so confused he ducks it. Santner thinks about stealing a bye, and then decides against it. No shot was played, no run was attempted, New Zealand essentially forfeited their last delivery.

Recency and result bias usually dictate what we focus on, and in the World Cup, few could be blamed for focusing on the end of England's innings and New Zealand's super over more than the close to the first innings.

Every run counts, and in that case, a stolen run there might have won a World Cup. And at that moment it's hard to say Santner was protecting his average, he certainly wasn't thinking about NRR and DLS was probably not at the front of his mind. He just did the cricket thing, the run wasn't there, so he called no.

The last ball isn't like the others, and if we learned from that match that the tiebreaker rules were poor, hopefully a few players learned to run until you're out, just in case it matters. You should be furious when you lose, but you should also know you did everything you could to win.