Time to drop Duckworth and Lewis?

Cricket appraises its double acts — be it the great English pre-war opening batsmen Jack Hobbs and Herbert Sutcliffe or the more recently retired West Indies fast bowlers Courtney Walsh and Curtly Ambrose or the charismatic pair of Sachin Tendulkar and Saurav Ganguly. Cricket has always been a game where an individual brilliance rarely equates to a victory; what is required is teamwork and coordination and that is what makes this sport so special. Yet it remains ambivalent about potentially the most influential duo, Frank Duckworth and Tony Lewis.

Duckworth and Lewis, joined at the hyphen, have made their presence felt on the cricketing field on numerous occasions while being miles away from all the action. As the grey clouds start hovering around over the ground, the couple suddenly soaks up a major quantum of everyone’s domain of imagination. The D/L method has been in use since more than 13 years now and it still continues to baffle the masses all over the world. One does not have to be a rocket scientist (but it certainly helps) to understand the intricacies of the calculations but by and large the world of cricket has embraced the method.

But as is the case with great players, during the course of their career they come across an opponent that more often than not seems to get better of them like the exploits of Pedro Collins against Sachin Tendulkar or Graeme Smith’s helplessness against Zaheer Khan. But the point is that one needs to adapt and acclamatize to the situations, you cannot just go on playing your natural game without taking into account the external factors. Pretty similar is the case with this method. Although it has served the cricketing quite amicably for so long, the D/L method finally seems to have met its meddlesome opponent.

With the onset of the T-20s, the works of Mr.Duckworth and Mr.Lewis have suddenly come under the scanner. And the point that is being raised against their theory is a valid and a logical one. You simply cannot superimpose a mathmatical principle built up for a particular format of the game onto another format. It is very obvious that this superimposition will surely be less effective as compared to its effectiveness in the original format for which it was developed. The entire mindset of the players and their approach to the game is different in the shorter version and hence implementing the same technique is infact a contradiction to the basic principle on which the method was incorporated.

Hence it is time we moved forward and let Duckworth and Lewis savour the monopoly in ODIs and leave the T-20s for something newer, something closer to this version of the game.