No amount of analysis can take luck out of sport
The editor of Cricket Statistician analyses recent events
After the second T20, it was reported that England were “raging” over Joe Root’s dismissal, given out lbw when replays clearly showed an edge onto the pad.
In these circumstances, such mistakes are always seen as crucial, never mind that Root, uncharacteristically, appeared to have lost the plot and in his previous two shots had skied the ball, luckily for him to a vacant part of the field.
International T20 is still a bit of a sideshow so it does not require neutral umpires or, in this case, any use of DRS.
Of course, there is no way of deciding in most cases whether a particular umpiring mistake, dropped catch, or whatever, is actually crucial because with that error the game has moved onto a different trajectory – we do not know whether, in any case, the batsman reprieved could have been out next ball.
Only where the error is on the last ball, where the dropped catch lets the batsmen take the winning run or the throw hits the stumps and prevents the winner, do we truly know the consequence.
In extreme cases, these things appear to matter – the batsman dropped or reprieved by the umpire on the way to a huge score, for instance. The famous example is from 1946/7 when Bradman was given not out having apparently been caught at slip. He went on to a big score but, more to the point, are suggestions that had he failed in this innings he might have retired from Test cricket two years earlier than he actually did... but then we are already into the world of speculation.
Cricket, we all thought, was the game above all others for the statistically-minded. But in recent years baseball has arguably pulled ahead with the growth of what they call sabernomics, leading to the relentless pursuit of data to play with.
More recently, we see OPTA applying the same approach to football – an approach that requires a large staff of ‘peasants’ entering data (which must surely imply some subjectivity) so you can tell exactly how far a player has run in the course of a game.
It is a little more difficult to decide how much of this is significant and how much is ‘headless chicken’. No amount of analysis, though, will tell you what is going to happen next.
What is difficult is for anyone – perhaps especially highly motivated sportspeople – to accept the role played by luck.
Golfer Gary Player famously said: “The more I practise, the luckier I get,” but he was playing a sport in which the actual mechanisms are solely your own. Where you have somebody directly intervening in what you are trying to do, the game changes.You cannot foresee injuries, you cannot foresee when somebody’s fumble may reprieve you.
You can rage against luck, but you can’t take it out of the game.