Equation <> Equation

I've been reading the series of cliché exposés on Amit Varma's blog (as he reports on the Indo-Pak Test series), and can add a biggie - one that will be on every commentator's lips once the one day series gets underway.

This is The Equation. Deep into the 35th over, when the batsmen are jockeying for position to enable them to time their chase to perfection to the chagrin of the fielding team, up pops a graphic on your TV screen with the number of balls, runs & wickets left. Dravid & Kaif will have one eye on the equation, which is getting tougher as the overs go by will inevitably follow.

Call me reactionary, but when I can't see even one "equal to" sign accompanying the word "equation", I get a little worked up. While Stephen Hawking gets told not to include too many equations in his books, cricket commentators drop the word after every commercial break as if they were chums with number theoreticians.

It had always been a favourite daydream of myself in my younger teens when after providing some excellent self-commentary to a game of wall-cricket, I would imagine being on august panels instructing the common public on the finer niceties of the game. And then it would happen. Somebody would say the word "equation", in response to which, setting asides the more immediate & ephemeral excitements of the run-chase, I would go:

Ahem Tony. Just on the matter of the "equation", you do realise that the variables are hardly cast into an equation...

... and launch on pleasurably until I was cut off by an irate producer. I could lose my job as a result, but anything for pedantry.

[This blogger would like to really, really know what the "equation" is]