The stats add up for TMS with Samson on board
Cricket’s favourite show has found another ‘Bearded Wonder’ in the South African mathematician, says Scyld Berry
Blofeld says the new man’s one fault is his handwriting. It is like an alcoholic spider’s
Test Match Special used to have a Bearded Wonder in Bill Frindall. They now have another in Andrew Samson, who is rather more relaxed and wryhumoured and knows about more than cricket.
Like several of the South African players, Samson, 53, has gone home between the second and third Tests: he lives in Johannesburg and has a birthday party for one of his two young daughters. But he will be back for the Oval Test on Thursday and ready to flabbergast listeners with the extent of his knowledge and his speed in finding the right answer.
Henry Blofeld remembers being flabbergasted when England played their last Test series in South Africa and a debutant, Hardus Viljoen, hit his first ball for four then took a wicket with his first ball. Samson immediately informed listeners that Viljoen was only the second man to achieve such a feat – and it was not exactly as if the first man to do so was famous. It was Matthew Henderson, who played the grand total of one Test, which happened to be New Zealand’s first ever, against England at Christchurch in 1929-30.
It was all down to preparation. Samson had already written a computer programme to find out what every player had done when facing his first ball in Test cricket as a batsman and when bowling it. So what human fault does the TMS statistician have? Blowers can only come up with: “Andrew’s handwriting. It’s like an alcoholic spider’s.”
At the last Test at Trent Bridge, Samson’s database extended to 110,818 cricket matches, ranging from all international games – men and women – down to under-19 level. His database for firstclass cricket numbered 58,067 matches, stretching back to Hampshire v England at Broadhalfpenny Down in 1772, which the Association of Cricket Statisticians classified as the inaugural first-class cricket match.
During that Test, Hashim Amla reached his first-innings 50 with a six – such things can happen when Liam Dawson is bowling – and his secondinnings 50 with a six, off Dawson again. Was this the first time anyone had done that? Samson had to write a programme to find the answer, which took, but he got there eventually: Andrew Symonds, for Australia against West Indies in Kingston, was the only previous batsman.
For only 83 per cent of Test matches (Trent Bridge was the 2,264th) does a ball-by-ball record exist: it is mainly for some early Tests in India, Pakistan and West Indies that scorebooks have disappeared. A scorebook for every England Test back to their 1959-60 tour of the West Indies has been found, and for every Ashes Test back until the First World War. The gold standard for scorers was set by Bill Ferguson, a New Zealander who scored – in amazing handwritten detail – for Australia from 1905 to 1954-55.
Samson pays tribute to two Melburnians, Charles Davis and Charlie Wat, for excavating scorebooks and reconstructing Australia’s old Tests, and to Frindall: “he hardly made a mistake – perhaps two or three ever”.
As for his non-cricket answers on TMS, Samson relies on Google, and his own brain. He was among the 100 entrants for a maths Olympiad for schoolboys in South Africa, before doing a degree in statistics at the University of Cape Town.
He had started scoring after he gave up playing cricket, having taken three for 14 as a legspinner for Alexandra Boys High Under-15 Bs in what was Pietermaritzburg.
“The expectation that you can use numbers to predict the future is greater than the reality,” Samson sagely concludes about statistics in general. But that does not stop him using numbers to tell us so much about cricket’s past.