Status and statistics – cricket’s hegemonic nonsense

Republished and updated after the Maldives were defeated by 249 runs against Bangladesh during the South Asian Games in Nepal. They were dismissed for 6, the same total that Mali made against Uganda earlier this year.

Run again last June, the Kwibuka Women’s Cricket Tournament is held to remember the Rwandan genocide in 1994, where up to a million people lost their lives in one of the cruelest attacks in human history.

Starting in 2014 and held every year since, the Kwibuka Tournament trophy has been shared between Kenya and Uganda in 3-2 split. Mali, a country who came to Rwanda’s aid in 1994, joined the tournament for the first time this year, along with Tanzania. Unfortunately, Kenya withdrew due to lack of funds.

What’s important to note is that the matches in this year’s tournament were classed as full T20 Internationals. In a move made last year by the ICC, cricket’s governing body granted all 105 members T20 international status, with the move part of a plan to globalise the game. Many applauded the move, though others took swipes at the move, claiming that the record books would be tainted by lopsided results and bullying individual performances.

Those clinging to statistical integrity likely fainted upon reading scores from Kigali this week, after Mali were bowled out for 6 in just 9 overs against the tournament hosts. Only one run came off the bat, with Rwanda chasing the target within an over.

No one in Mali had picked up a bat or ball in organised cricket until 2002, when students took up the game in a region of Bamako, the nation’s capital. The Kalanso School held the nation’s first ever tournament, before its popularity spread across other parts of the city.

The people caught up in their own frustrations of these matches counting in their beloved records forget that Mali playing international cricket is an achievement in itself. For a Francophonic nation in West Africa to field an international team 17 years removed from having no cricket at all is incredible.

The Kwibuka tournament and everything it stands for should be what steals headlines. Afghanistan, a Full Member by comparison, still face the cruel political struggle of women participating in sport. Their stories and situations may be a case of comparing apples and oranges, though it helps to illustrate just how special Mali is for fielding an international Women’s team, less than twenty years after school kids took up the game.

Some statisticians, believing they have this ownership of these stats, were almost offended to include these numbers, and this strange entitlement only hinders the development of cricket and its growth. One statistician had the audacity to ‘call on’ the ICC to rethink their change of handing every member T20 international status, so the records of the most skilled are not tainted. This urge failed to consider that players of Associate nations, deprived of this socially-constructed ‘status’, have never been allowed the opportunity to ever prove their worth. And the lack of funding that would have accelerated this development and opportunity? Tough luck according to some people and their databases. ‘Unlucky for not being colonised by the British. Your numbers don’t count. Sorry,’ they might as well say.

As Paul Frame on Twitter rightfully points out, the lowest First Class total also happens to be 6, made by a team called the Bs against England in 1810.

Stats and records in cricket are far from sacred, with some scores in the game’s infancy definitely not within the parameters of what self-professed gate-keepers would consider acceptable. As Paul Frame on Twitter rightfully points out, the lowest First Class total also happens to be 6, made by a team called The Bs against England in 1810.

The Bs was a team made up of English First Class players who were lucky to have a surname starting with B, plus a sprinkling of other players to make up the numbers. To discuss the integrity of statistics, we could go back and debate the status of this example, though because we look at these matches through rose-tinted lenses, no one questions why matches like this are in the history books. So why, when Uganda then took on Mali and posted a score in excess of 300, did no one congratulate Uganda for breaking records? Proscovia Alako became the first Associate player to score a Women’s T20 century, though failed to receive the scale of plaudits she deserved.

In 2019, ESPNCricinfo ran a story from a concerned reader who had the nerve to say that Adam Voges’ Test career had ruined his beloved list of Test batting averages. The reader, whose ‘only real dream in life was to be the first Test cricketer to bridge that seemingly absurd gap between the Don and the best of the rest’, couldn’t handle when Adam Voges achieved the same dream. This particular individual then had the audacity, sarcastic or not, to blame the West Indies of ballooning Voges’ numbers, forgetting that those playing Test cricket in a bygone era most likely took on bowling attacks far weaker in comparison.

Though here lies another problem. Due to the different playing and climatic conditions, plus the unique ground dimensions, scores will always be different around the world. Different eras have also produced different totals and records with the relationship between bat and ball shifting, and to compound all of this, laws and playing conditions of cricket have dramatically evolved. The One Day International format alone has changed in over allotments, fielding restrictions and the number of balls used.

Eight ball overs were still bowled in international cricket as late as 1980. Cricket’s rules and its records evolve, so why are people still clinging onto the faux-sanctity of old numbers? People outside cricket would laugh and question why some international matches meet status requirements while others do not, and it’s image of elitism only hinders bringing new people to the game.

Blowouts and skewed numbers are found throughout every sport, yet other sports never face issues of stats keepers on some self-professed high ground rubbishing records. Baseball, a sport more meticulous in its metrics than cricket, certainly didn’t panic when the Texas Rangers gave the Baltimore Orioles a 30-3 thumping in August 2007. On top of Baltimore’s performance, riddled with poor pitching and fielding errors, Oriole Park is also one of the smaller parks in Major League Baseball. Just like ground dimensions in cricket, there is no strict guideline on how a ballpark needs to be set out. It’s an added charm to both bat-and-ball sports, and no doubt affects stats and scores.

The added challenge this brings for competitors in both sports forces them to adapt to solve problems on the field to win the match they’re playing in, with records accumulated from this being repeated over and over again. Not every match is played at the centre wicket of Lord’s, on an 18 degree day in July. Cricket’s charm lies in its subtle differences around the world. One boundary may be 60 metres, though another boundary could be 80 metres. To go one further, pitches are as individual as the players who bowl and bat on them. Bertus de Jong’s “Of stats and status anxiety” on Cricbuzz last year discusses cricket’s match-to-match curiosities in more detail.

For a sport that supposedly revolves around stats, cricket still applies them comparatively crudely. In limited overs a batsman’s strike rate – itself a relatively recent innovation – takes no account for the rate required, making no distinction between a match-winning 50 off 70 balls chasing a low total with the tail and a match-losing 50 off 70 on a flat track.

No account is taken for the conditions, for the match state, for the actual quality of opposition faced. For a bowler’s statistics, no distinction is made, quite incredibly if you think about it, between the wicket of a batsman and a tail-ender.

Anyone would admit that the Netherlands’ Ryan ten Doeschate or indeed Jersey’s Jonty Jenner are better batsmen than, say, Steve Finn or Shannon Gabriel. Yet when you look at the stats, Finn’s wicket is indistinguishable from that of Virat Kohli, but ten Doechate’s doesn’t count at all.

– Bertus de Jong

No one put an asterisk on Australia’s 31-0 victory over American Samoa in their 2002 Men’s FIFA World Cup Qualifier. Even when it was reported that several American Samoan players were unavailable to play due to visa issues and a second-string side were thrown onto the field, no one at FIFA wanted to erase the game from the records. Archie Thompson’s 13 goals didn’t automatically make him the most prolific striker in history, and the result is not, and never will be, compared to Brazil’s 2-0 victory over Germany to ultimately claim the 2002 World Cup trophy. Though, in the eyes of some in cricket, they would see a 31-0 result as simply a result of 29 goals better than another international match. That sentence is ridiculous enough to read, let alone try and understand.

Other sports are smart enough to conceptualise and provide context when outliers enter the books. At the time of writing, India’s Sunil Chhetri has more international goals than Lionel Messi. Iran’s Ali Daei has more international goals than anyone, though any knowledgeable football fan can compare his record to others in the esteemed list and deduce that he isn’t the best striker of all time. Through comparing goals per game and difficulty of opposition for example, Daei slides down a hypothetical ranking. To add to this, football, like other sports has evolved, with a shift in defensive focus in the modern game compared to say the 1950s and 60s. Players of the ilk of Pele and Puskas revolutionised attacking play (Puskas is credited for ‘inventing’ the drag back), though enjoyed opposition throwing men forward, and thus enjoyed better goals-per-game ratios than elite attackers today. For the Brazilian Ronaldo and Messi, constant international play against strong South American opposition hurt their numbers.

To continue with the football metaphor, when we look at the records of some of Europe’s top strikers, do we ask them to not count goals scored against lesser teams who fail to qualify for the Euros or the World Cup? Miroslav Klose has five goals against Azerbaijan, three against Kazakhstan and two against both the Faroe Islands and Luxembourg. People are smart enough to take the data they are given to help but not completely tell a story with the data.

By the logic of those who feel matches like Mali’s shouldn’t count, it’s fair then to ask how they feel when Associate players achieve greatness against Full Members. Do they think of Ireland and Kevin O’Brien’s miraculous chase in Bangalore against England at the 2011 World Cup as some double achievement due to the against-all-odds outcome? Were they jumping up and down after Scotland’s win over England last year? It’s fine for them in this case to have them in their records because it suits them, though it’s rather convenient that neither of these results have barely been mentioned so far at a ten-team Cricket ‘World Cup’.

The Netherlands defeated a full member in Zimbabwe convincingly, curiously in the first ever occasion where an ODI was held outside, but during, a World Cup. No mention of the result filtered through in World Cup coverage, and one must ask if those reading the scorecard are blaming Zimbabwe’s downward slide for the result, or rather praising Dutch fight. In the end, neither should decide if this match should count. These results are worth just as much as the World Cup game between New Zealand and South Africa that was played at the same time, but those in this weird hegemony think they hold the aces and choose not to worry about them. They shouldn’t even have a hand in this metaphorical poker game.

Are statisticians that narrowed in to only want to keep track of 12 international teams? Are they that scared of having to remember names and scores of obscure associate cricket countries whose participation numbers are booming? Do they forget that those in Associate countries have been denied this opportunity purely because of something so arbitrary as ‘status’ until now?

This tunnel vision is the elitist nonsense that limits cricket and its growth, and has done so for too long. What’s the issue that there are young teenagers playing international women’s cricket, considering young teens have played men’s Test cricket. Hasan Raza would still have debuted at 14 even if record-tracking gate-keepers ran onto the field in disgust. For records’ sake, no one even knows how old Shahid Afridi was when he made his One Day International debut in 1996. Not even Afridi himself, it appears.

Records are meant to be broken. Cricket, like every other athletic endeavour, goes through revolution. Numbers end up different across different eras and for different reasons, and for that, the numbers may not lie, but they also don’t tell the whole truth. Context and conceptualising needs to be done to done to come to conclusions. Technology changes cricket. Formats change cricket. Bradman’s 99.94 isn’t just special because no one has come close since, but because no one in his era was within ten miles of him, and on uncovered wickets, no less.

Bradman’s averarage isn’t sacred because it’s a number we memorise growing up and aspire to, but because there is a possibility that no one will eclipse it. If someone was to reach or surpass Bradman’s numbers, one should applaud them, though the attitude shown by stats gate-keepers suggests they’d rather this happen when they are buried six feet under.

Cricket numbers are already skewed by eras, climate, pitch conditions, ground dimensions and playing opposition. We don’t see golf tragics take a -15 at Pebble Beach and put it against a -15 at a comparatively tougher Augusta National. Those with any knowledge know how skewed the numbers can be, and people selecting cricket teams are paid good money to balance and debate one score’s significance over another, because they know how stats don’t tell the whole story.

The idea that Mali and Rwanda’s records don’t count because they include two relative newcomers, and the people carrying this attitude, only stunt the growth of the game. This mentality hinders any chance to break down the stereotypes of the game being upper class to those unfortunate to start from the outside of cricket’s exclusive Full Member club looking in. To think that stats are pure, absolute markers of one team or player’s ability over another, is flawed and foolish.

Every country should have the right to play international cricket. Let’s call upon those stuck in the cricketing hegemony to embrace a more diverse and inclusive game, complete with records that reflect the same. No one cares about record books for personal sentiment, and those records are rubbish when they can’t tell a complete story anyway.

Story originally published 21 June 2019. Updated 6 December 2019.

A side note to finish: I hate composing pieces like this in first person and refuse to do it. Without referring to myself in this piece, I believe it is of some note in this argument that I work professionally in sports stats, with a focus on cricket.