The game was played on one of those delightful Dunedin afternoons when it was sunny one minute and the rain was coming in sideways the next.
There were two interruptions during Northern’s innings, and NZC head of cricket operations Charlie Brewer said, in their haste to get the game restarted, the umpires miscalculated how much time was left in the match and reduced the overs by too much.
"Obviously it was an incredibly challenging day, just with the on and off [state of play], and that does require multiple calculations to determine how many overs are left within the match," Brewer said.
"They had to do that a number of times and essentially that led to one of those calculations being done incorrectly, which resulted in the game being shortened by four overs more than it needed to be at the time, which was effectively two overs in each innings.
"The irony about it was the guys were working so hard to maximise play and were rushing those processes. It was just human error at the end of the day."
There was a lot riding on the outcome of the game, which Northern won by 22 runs (DLS method).
It was effectively a quarterfinal. The winners progressed to the playoffs and losers were eliminated.
The error happened during the second rain interruption when the game was reduced from 17 overs apiece to 12 overs.
That was a 10-over reduction in the game for a 16-minute interruption to play.
Six overs should have been deducted instead of 10.
Northern posted 94 for one from 12 overs and the Sparks ended up chasing a revised target of 87 from nine overs and finished well short, scoring 64 for six.
Brewer accepted the umpires’ error had an impact on the game.
"The temptation is to speculate around what could have happened in those four overs. But from NZC’s side, the key point there is the error impacted both teams equally."
Sparks coach Craig Cumming agreed.
"If you take four overs out of any game it has an impact, but it has an impact on both sides," he said.
"But if anything has come out of this, it is that the Duckworth-Lewis-Stern system, from what I know, is set up the same for the male and female game."
Cumming said he was not sure whether the same calculations should apply to both the men’s and women’s game.
"The ideal outcome would have been to have got a full game, but we can’t control the weather.
"At the end of the day, we still played enough overs to get a result."
