Introducing Duckworth and Lewis - cricket's greatest double act

Bat and ball / Andrew Hughes / 20 May 2008 / Leave a Comment

Andrew Hughes on two men who changed the face of one-day cricket forever

Which is the most well known cricket partnership of the modern era?

I'll give you a clue. Their names have appeared on scorecards from Barbados to Birmingham; from Bulawayo to Bangalore. Perhaps Hayden and Langer? Strauss and Trescothick? McGrath and Lee? Good guesses, but not right.

No, in years to come, our grandchildren will look back on this era of the great game and ask, with a puzzled tone, "Granddad, who were Duckworth and Lewis?"

Just as the Ancient Greeks once consulted the Delphic Oracle and Jewish tribes put their trust in the Wisdom of Solomon, so modern cricketers evoke the words Duckworth and Lewis as the final judgement when the rain falls. But who are the eponymous pair and how did they come to exercise such an influence on the modern game? For the answer to that question, we have to travel back to the 1992 World Cup.

Previously, in rain-affected games, the target for the team batting second was reduced in line with the scoring rate of the team batting first. But this tended to produce comparatively easy targets. So a new system was devised for that tournament.

Under the 'Australian method', as it came to be known, the target for the team batting second was reduced in line with the lowest scoring over of the team who batted first. It was elegant, it was simple and it had only one tiny flaw. It didn't work.

In the semi-final at the SCG, South Africa, chasing England's 252 -6 were 22 runs short with 13 balls remaining when the players went off for rain. Two overs were lost to the weather. When they came back out, the revised target was unchanged. South Africa needed 22 runs off 1 ball. As the crowd booed their derision, radio commentator Christopher Martin Jenkins speculated that surely someone could come up with something better.

Listening to that broadcast was Frank Duckworth, a consultant statistician. He realised that rough and ready methods were not producing fair results and that a mathematical solution was required. Together with university lecturer, Tony Lewis, he developed a method based on the principle that a batting team has two resources available to it: wickets and overs.

They produced a formula that enabled a target score to be changed to reflect the loss of resources to one or both teams when a match is shortened one or more times. In the case of the 1992 game, South Africa would have needed five off the last ball. If a game is halted completely, the method can even project what the team batting second would have scored and so declare a winner.

First used in 1996/97 and formally adopted in 2001, the initial scepticism of players and administrators has faded and the Duckworth Lewis method has gradually become widely accepted as a fair system for setting targets in rain reduced games. It has, however, attracted some controversy, particularly when used to predict the winner when play is stopped permanently.

For example, in the 2003 World Cup, the South Africans, needing to beat Sri Lanka to qualify for the Super Sixes, mistakenly thought they were 'ahead' on the Duckworth Lewis method when the game ended due to heavy rain. In fact, they had misread the chart that both teams had been given and the match had ended in a tie. They went out of the tournament and Shaun Pollock was sacked as captain.

Since then, both the 2007 World Cup Final and England's last one day match in New Zealand this year ended in farce amid doubts about whether to continue playing when the Duckworth Lewis system had already indicated the winner.

It isn't a perfect method. It is not transparent or simple and this instinctively feels wrong to sportsmen. And when rain is forecast, it can sometimes encourage teams to bat simply to preserve wickets, as South Africa did in 2003. But overall, it has to be judged a success. Certainly the days of ridiculous targets such as we saw in 1992 are gone. No doubt in the future, more sophisticated models might emerge. But for the time being, we are indebted to Mr Duckworth and Mr Lewis.