I ran across a phrase in an article on a member of the soccer club I’ve adopted as favorite, Bohemian FC of Dublin:
It may have taken some time for the 21-year-old [Conor Powell] to break his duct, but he has become such a notable regular in the starting eleven that supporters would be forgiven for thinking that he already had a few goals under his belt.
From a quick Google, it looks to be a typo for “break his duck,” as in duck’s egg, as in nought or zero — what we’d refer to as a goose egg.
It’s originally a 19th-century cricket term, e.g. “break his duck’s egg” meaning to score at last. Michael Quinion says:
It’s not as cruel as it sounds. It’s not the duck that’s being broken, but a duck’s egg. These days the expression can be used in almost any game that involves a score of some sort but originally — back in Victorian times — it related solely to cricket. It seems to have been English public-school slang of the 1850s to call a score of nought against a player’s name a duck’s egg — presumably a duck rather than a chicken because a duck’s egg is bigger and more prominent.
A player who had scored, who had moved off that accusing zero on the scoreboard, was said to have broken his duck’s egg. It began to appear in print in the early 1860s and soon people shortened it just to duck. The first known example of that form appeared in the Daily News in August 1868: “You see … that his fear of a ‘duck’ — as by a pardonable contraction from duck-egg a nought is called in cricket-play — outweighs all other earthly considerations.” A batsman who was dismissed without scoring was said to be out for a duck.
