No two people burn identical calories doing the same activity, even at the same weight — individual metabolic efficiency, fitness level, and movement economy all shift the real number by a meaningful margin. MET-based estimates are built from population averages, so treat the result as a reasonable planning figure for tracking relative effort across sessions, not a precise number to balance against a food diary gram-for-gram.

This matters more for stop-start sports than steady-state ones. A cricketer's fielding session or a badminton match involves bursts of high intensity separated by low-intensity waiting, and MET tables average that out — so the estimate tends to be less exact for these sports than for something like continuous running, where effort is far more uniform across the session.

For most people the practical use of a calorie burn estimate is comparative, not absolute: seeing that a bowling-heavy training session burns meaningfully more than a batting-only net session helps with planning meals and recovery around training load, even if the exact kcal figure carries a real margin of error.