Rain has a nasty habit of curtailing one-day limited overs cricket matches, but it was not until the mid-1990s, thanks to the intervention of the statistician Frank Duckworth, that a watertight formula was found to provide a satisfactory result for weather-affected encounters.
From the 60s onwards, when the shortened form of the game became popular at the top level, the cricketing authorities had experimented with a number of crude ways of deciding the result of a rain-interrupted match.
