Oi, statto, NO!
I’ve been driven to deliver this empassioned plea by a pair of articles appearing in Spin magazine which try to statistically determine the greatest players of all time and rank them alongside each other. When I read them, I quickly became quite angry.
Most cricket fans love an argument over a few pints. Was Warne better than Grimmett or O’Reilly? How would WG have compared on modern pitches? Who is the best medium-paced dobber with a stupid haircut ever?
We don’t take it too seriously, it’s mostly a bit of fun, banter and getting the better of your mates. In contrast, a statistician with too much spare time on his hands is possibly one of the most dangerous things in our modern world. Much more so than, say, forgetting to stop, look and listen on the streets of Rome.
The reason most of us don’t take it too seriously is because we know that stats can be twisted to back up any argument you wished to prove. If I wanted to prove to you that Bradman was actually from Mars and was part of a CIA conspiracy, I could use his test batting stats and present them to you as Exhibit A.
It’s impossible to use stats objectively because they cannot possibly cover every single variable. Ok, the ICC rankings take into account the relative strength of the opposition and that sort of thing, but can they account for what each team was fed for breakfast before every test match? Or whether the debutant’s mum accidently packed his Tuesday socks instead of his Thursday ones? Or even the rules of the game in any given era, damn it. How do you accurately account for the difference between covered and uncovered pitches?
But the fact that I could use statistics to prove that Devon Malcolm was the finest leg-spinner in history is not the main reason why this has got me so hot under the collar. The main reason is this:
Oi, Statto. NO!
It is wrong.
I couldn’t care less that Ian Botham has four more career ranking points than Sachin Tendulkar[1]. Or that the Australian side of 1959/60 is the second highest ranked team ever.
It is simply wrong to try and rank players throughout history. Anyone who tries to quantify cricket’s history in that way is completely missing the point of why we have that history in the first place.
Cricket’s history is a narrative, an epic opus, not a set of annually posted accounts to be audited and filed away.
When I read an account of a cricket match, I want to know it’s story. I want to learn about the flow of the game, what happened at the key moments, who grabbed it by the lapels and shook it until it passed out.
I want to know the reactions of the crowd, to understand how the players interacted with each other and the umpires, to get a sense of the emotions and pressures that the participants had to try to adapt to.
I’m not interested in how many dot balls the first change seamer bowled between lunch and tea compared to last year, unless it adds to the narrative of the match in some way.
Most of all, I want to imagine how I would feel if I was there watching it. To me, cricket history is like a great work of fiction that actually happened. I want to get to know the characters, journey with them through the plot and experience the moments that the narrative is trying to convey. A bit like this:
There was never much chance of a definite result with one day lost through rain, but the match was made more memorable by the no-balling of Meckiff for throwing and his subsequent retirement from first class cricket. [...]
Then came the dramatic over by Meckiff who was no-balled by Egar on his second, third, fifth and ninth deliveries. That was his only over. Egar was booed and Meckiff was carried shoulder high by a section of the crowd at the close. [...]
No play was possible on Monday and on the fourth day extra police were sent to the ground because of fears that the umpires, selectors and Benaud might be molested because of the Meckiff incident. There were no scenes.[2]
Did Meckiff know straight away that this would be the last over in his career? Why was it Benaud’s policy to not use a bowler again in the match if he was called for throwing? Why did some of the crowd react so angrily when throwing was seen as one of cricket’s greatest misdemeanours?
This also works better as a narrative than it does when converted into a rating and applied to a formula:
Did that chap find any damage done when he peered over the wall? After the 4th six, Sobers turns to the keeper and laughs. I wonder what they said? How did the fielder feel after he had palmed the 5th ball over the rope for another six?
You see, it’s all about the story, not how far each six travelled and whether it was statistically a better achievement than Yuvraj Singh’s 6 sixes off Stuart Broad. Those things have no place in the narrative. Unfortunately I think we have lost sight of this in the current era, with it’s obsession with putting everything into a pigeon-hole, and on-screen graphics that have to be devised live and often in a matter of seconds.
If I am reading The Three Musketeers, I don’t waste time wondering which Musketeer was statistically the greatest. I don’t expect Dumas to explain the average sword-stroke speed of d’Artagnan as compared to Aramis or try and find a way to rank them alongside Milady’s assasins. You don’t try to break down classic literature into it’s constituent parts and then try and represent it in binary. Nor do I want to do it with cricket.
Cricket is a stat-heavy sport, with every event recorded for posterity. By all means use those stats to clarify facts or add colour to the story, and do so freely.
But don’t embark on an impossible task that sucks all the joy and soul out of the experience. Never mind whether Verity was “greater” than Underwood or Richards was “greater” than Weekes. We’d need to agree on the definition of greatness first.
Besides, if your statistical analysis shows that Jacques Kallis is the 8th most valuable Test player of all time, while Shane Warne doesn’t even make the top 20, then you’ve probably forgotten to carry the 1.
Footnotes
[1] – Tendulkar fans most definitely would care, but that’s a post can of worms for another, much braver, day than this one.
[2] – Extract from the Wisden report for the 1st Test between Australia and South Africa, Brisbane, 1963
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