Duckworth levelled the playing field for cricket, didn’t he?

livemint.com:

Last Friday, cricket buffs around the world shared a loss, one that was felt most acutely by protestors against the vagaries of weather. Frank Duckworth died at the age of 84. He was a statistician who batted for justice.

He was an Englishman, too, and the great injustice that drew him to the arena of a sport that makes heroic claims to fairness was an unfair win by his own country. In a semi-final match of the 1992 World Cup between England and South Africa, his country’s team batted first and set a target of 252 runs in 45 overs after the last five got lopped off by rain, which had stopped play for a while. In their turn at the crease, South African batters were steadily chasing that total and had scored 231 for 6 wickets in 42.5 overs when a drizzle called players off the field again.

For victory, South Africa needed just 22 runs off 13 balls, easily doable with a few big hit across the boundary. But when they got back after the forced break, they had only one ball left to make 22 runs. An almost sure win was turned into a sudden loss by a crude rain rule that deleted England’s two least-scoring overs (both with no runs scored) from its score-sheet to reset a target for 43 overs.

That twist of fate ordered by a cloudy sky had two consequences of note. England advanced to the final and lost to Pakistan, granting it the World Cup and its captain Imran Khan an aura that would later aid his rise in politics. Less fuzzy was what it did to cricket by provoking folks for whom statistics didn’t merely mean data—let alone lies, damned or otherwise—but justice.

After all, as a discipline, it’s doomed if it doesn’t strive against bias. This is the passion that animates the dispassionate. Which may explain why Duckworth teamed up