Frank and Tony are great friends who live 60 miles from each other; occasionally they travel halfway to a pub to share a pint of beer and talk. It’s not casual conversations; it’s calculative to the core and serious.

The cricket world knows them as Duckworth and Lewis, and yesterday they again came into the picture when India registered a 38-run victory, thanks to their formula, to stay alive in the seven-match ODI series against England. Theirs is a partnership that is here to stay. And it is, as they say, a privilege to meet up with one half of this typically British team.

Frank Duckworth believes that despite storms over their calculations, the discomfort of skippers having to keep a piece of paper in their pocket and the complications involved in its calculations, the D/L method has been well accepted. “I think a lot of people accept that what my friend and I have done is a fairly useful contribution. I don’t think they either like it or dislike it in particular. It isn’t complicated at all. It’s very simple, we have made it very simple. It’s just look at the figure in tables, when play has stopped, look up another figure when play resumes, subtract one from the other and multiply by the side’s score. It’s not much more than that.”

Duckworth then goes on to explain his method in words this time, rather than figures. “It is based on a mathematical formula which related the runs that are possible to achieve in terms of how many overs you have left and how many wickets are down. We got this number into this formula based on the statistical analysis of many hundreds of one-day matches and then you can work out on an average on what you do by losing out overs during the match.”

... contd.