Call me a whingeing Pom if you want, but what happened at the Oval on Monday must go down as one of the biggest nonsenses seen in a rain- affected cricket match since South Africa were told they needed 21 from one ball in the 1992 World Cup.

That incident, which followed a rain-delay with South Africa wanting 22 from 13 balls, was a major factor in the creation of the Duckworth-Lewis system, a complex but largely respected method for recalculating targets in the event of rain.

What the Duckworth-Lewis method did, through an analysis of scoring patterns, was determine what was a fair score for a team to chase in the event of a rain reducing the number of overs that could be bowled.

It recognised what previous rudimentary methods had not, that the fewer the overs the faster teams can score.

But two things have thrown spanners in the works of Messrs Duckworth and Lewis. One is the introduction of Power Play overs (where special fielding restrictions apply); the other is the advent of Twenty20. The Duckworth-Lewis scoring charts were originally based on scoring patterns from 50-overs matches but 20-overs cricket has changed everything. As the Duckworth-Lewis system acknowledges, the fewer the overs, the faster teams score.

The Duckworth-Lewis website admits it has had to ignore Power Play overs because there is no practical way to incorporate them into its system. It also bravely claims that the Duckworth-Lewis system is "particularly" well suited to Twenty20 cricket. Pull the other one.

Since Monday, Frank Duckworth has come clean on a few things. He has admitted that the system does indeed need looking at (that'll cheer up England, I'm sure) and that there has been a shortage of Twenty20 data (strange this, as there seems to be a Twenty20 tournament going on somewhere in the world every week, not all of them arranged by Lalit Modi). Duckworth was also reported as saying that his charts had not been updated for three years. If true, this is scandalous. In Twenty20 terms, three years ago was the stone age. For the professional game, these charts should be updated every season.

Mathematically, what happened at the Oval was bonkers. England scored 161 from 20 overs at a run-rate of 8.05. West Indies, in return, were asked to maintain a rate of just 8.88 for nine overs. Given that West Indies had ten wickets to play with, this increase in run-rate (which equates to 10.3 percent) seems nothing like enough, as Chris Gayle, the West Indies captain, tacitly admitted when he said that during such a short innings the loss of a wicket meant little except a dot ball.

Compare this with the revised targets Duckworth-Lewis came up with for two 50-overs games involving England last winter. In Bangalore in November, India scored 166 for four from 22 overs when their 50-overs innings was cut short. England were then asked to make 198 in 22 overs themselves. India's run-rate was 7.55 but England were asked to score at 9.00, an increase of 19 percent.

England lost that game but won one in Barbados in March, when rain cut their reply to a West Indies score of 239 for nine in 50 overs to 135 in 20 overs. West Indies had scored at 4.78 runs per over and England were told they needed to maintain a rate of 6.75, a percentage rise of 41 percent - a big hike but then (like West Indies on Monday) England did have all ten wickets at their disposal for a very short innings.

Had West Indies been told to improve on England's score by 41 percent on Monday, they would have been set 102, which might have made for a better contest and one they might still have won (England won easily in Barbados). I would suggest that the shorter the innings, the more flawed the Duckworth-Lewis calculations prove.

Let's look at it another way. In this tournament, England's 161 was fractionally above the average first-innings score in matches between Test-ranked teams (ie, excluding those involving minnows) yet a target of 80 in nine overs looks easier-than-average compared to the scores being posted in the last nine overs of those innings.