Rain has a nasty behavior of curbing one-day restricted overs cricket matches, but it surely was not till the mid-Nineties, due to the intervention of the statistician Frank Duckworth, {that a} watertight method was discovered to supply a passable consequence for weather-affected matches.
From the 60s onwards, when the shortened type of the sport grew to become po0pular on the prime degree, the cricketing authorities had experimented with a variety of crude methods of deciding the results of a rain-interrupted match.
Though these labored successfully in some circumstances, they had been on no account foolproof, and very often groups that had been batting second discovered themselves being set unfeasible targets to win after a rain break.
This got here most dramatically into the general public consciousness in the course of the semi-finals of the 1992 World Cup, by which, after rain had briefly stopped play, with South Africa needing a manageable 22 runs to win off 13 balls towards England, the gamers got here again to the sphere to be informed that beneath the system in place they nonetheless had 22 runs to attain to win, however off only one ball – basically an impossibility.
Eager to proper such injustices, Duckworth, who has died aged 84, had by that point already been engaged on a fancy mathematical method that might take many extra components into consideration than simply overs and runs, and would place extra of an emphasis on the true state of the sport when rain had stopped play.
Ultimately discovering a kindred spirit to assist him with the duty – a fellow mathematician, Tony Lewis – he tuned and retuned the system till it emerged because the Duckworth-Lewis methodology and was adopted throughout the sport from 2001 onwards.
Though there have been minor changes since, the method has proved so strong that rain-related run-chase controversies have nearly disappeared from the sport. Hardly may a extra complete and efficient answer have been discovered to any sporting drawback, and its originators grew to become, by means of its widespread use, family names internationally – even when few folks knew precisely who they had been.
Duckworth was born in Lytham St Annes in Lancashire, to Eric, who ran a constructing firm, and his spouse, Annie. A cricket fan as a toddler, he loved enjoying the sport on the city’s King Edward VII grammar faculty, though he by no means progressed past home video games.
A maths prodigy, by the point he had arrived at Liverpool College to review physics within the late 50s he had grow to be an armchair cricketer as a substitute, listening avidly to matches on the radio.
After graduating within the early 60s he stayed on at Liverpool to review for a PhD in metallurgy, sharing a home for a time with John Lennon, as a lodger of Lennon’s aunt Mimi (“not that we had a lot to do with him, though we heard him plucking his guitar often”). Later he moved on to a flatshare with the longer term TV presenter Johnny Ball.
Duckworth’s first job was with the Central Electrical energy Producing Board at Berkeley Nuclear Laboratories in Gloucestershire, the place he was chargeable for inspecting radioactive gas after its service in nuclear reactors. Recruited initially as a metallurgist, inside a yr he had established himself as a substitute as a statistician, remaining in that function at Berkeley for the remainder of his working life.
Statistics additionally grew to become Duckworth’s interest: in his spare time in 1971 he carried out an evaluation of soccer league floor attendances, which he shared with the FA, and he joined the Royal Statistical Society (RSS) in 1975. Nevertheless, it took some years for him to show his consideration to cricket.
In 1988 he heard the cricket commentator Christopher Martin-Jenkins studying out listener ideas on how you can discover a means of pretty adjusting matches to account for time misplaced to rain. Many of the concepts had been so mathematically unsound that he decided to set his personal extra finely tuned thoughts to the issue.
“I realised {that a} honest correction wanted to take account not simply of what number of overs had been misplaced, however the state of the match – overs bowled, wickets misplaced, and when the overs had been misplaced,” he stated. “This required a mathematical relationship to be established, giving the variety of runs that could possibly be scored from all mixtures of overs obtainable and wickets in hand.” After arising with a method that might just do that, he wrote a pc program to encapsulate it.
Taking a beneficiant early retirement bundle from his employer in 1992, the yr of the World Cup semi-final debacle, on the age of 53 Duckworth discovered himself able to pay extra consideration to his challenge. He phoned up the Take a look at and Nation Cricket Board to inform them of his work, and after they confirmed curiosity he offered a paper to an RSS convention in Sheffield which he titled Honest Leads to Foul Climate.
The next yr he obtained a letter from Lewis, a maths lecturer on the College of the West of England in Bristol, who had heard about his presentation and was excited about taking the concept additional. The pair found that they lived just a few miles aside in Gloucestershire and shared a love of beer, and so started to satisfy frequently within the comfortable of the Pickwick Inn within the village of Decrease Wick to thrash out and refine the method. By October 1995, after many changes, they’d discovered the answer: Z(u, w) = Z0(w)[1 − exp{−b(w)u}].
First adopted in 1997 on England’s tour of Zimbabwe, the Duckworth-Lewis Technique was so profitable that it was formally adopted throughout the entire of the sport 4 years later, and stays in place to this present day. “Our means isn’t excellent, but it surely works about 99.5% of the time,” stated Duckworth.
Quickly after the tactic’s widespread adoption, Duckworth grew to become a guide statistician to the Worldwide Cricket Council, a place he occupied alongside his longstanding editorship of the RSS’s information journal. He retired from each jobs in 2014.
In 2009 an Irish pop band referred to as The Duckworth Lewis Technique (shaped by Neil Hannon of the Divine Comedy and Thomas Walsh of Pugwash) launched an album of the identical identify that featured a collection of cricket-themed songs. In 2011 Duckworth and Lewis collectively wrote a guide on the tactic and its origins.
Together with Lewis (who died in 2020), Duckworth was appointed MBE in 2010 for his statistical work, which additionally included the creation, after the 1986 Chernobyl catastrophe, of an Worldwide Nuclear and Radiological Occasion Scale, which tries to place the dangers associated to nuclear energy technology into perspective.
He’s survived by his spouse, Jeannie (nee Shorey), a trainer, and their daughter.
