Talk:Dead rubber

A fact from Dead rubber appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know column on 2 January 2006. The text of the entry was as follows:

Did you know... that a dead-rubber is a term used in sporting parlance to describe a match in a series where the series result has already been decided by earlier matches?

A record of the entry may be seen at Wikipedia:Recent additions/2006/January.

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Better example?

In the example given in this article, Australia won the series against the West Indies 3-0, winning the third an final test by 7 wickets http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/cricket/4480320.stm .

To say that this syndrome was likely in this series is inaccurate as the Australian team (who had lost the Ashes in the summer) were still a vastly superior team and looked to continue their dominance of the first two tests into the third and did just that.

There are better examples of this syndrome, look at English Rugby. London Wasps have finished second in the league for the past 3 seasons only to have won the final match (between the top two teams) to decide who "won" and have been beaten earlier in the season by the teams they defeated (Bath, Gloucester and Leicester).

Hyphenation?

Does the noun usually have a hyphen? My (British English, cricketing) perspective, I'd say "This is a dead rubber" (no hyphen for the noun) but "England suffered from dead-rubber syndrome" (hyphenated for the adjective). This is standard BrE as far as I'm aware. Loganberry (Talk) 14:20, 24 May 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Query

As commented out from the article, as I don't understand it "Some competitions such as the Baseball World Series prevent dead rubber matches by designating a series as "Best of 3" or "Best of 5"." - so how does that work if it's best of 5, and Team A wins the first 3 rubbers, or similar? 78.151.213.10 (talk) 06:29, 23 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]

The World Series would be more accurately described as "first to win 4 games" rather than best of seven. This competition, as well as other play-off series is American baseball and other sports, are designed to end once one team has won the number of games required. It would only be a "best of seven" if it took all seven games for one team to win the designated number. Another factor which might be in play here is that in all US playoffs, games are played to a conclusion, with overtime/extra innings as necessary to determine a winner. Otherwise, you could have a best of seven conceivably be a 3 win, 2 loss, 2 tie record.

It would appear that in some situations, all games are played even if the outcome has been decided. I am guessing that, since the references to this seem to be from British things, that perhaps it is related to the "culture" of sport being different than the US.Wschart (talk) 18:54, 2 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]