• ABOUT
  • PRINT
  • PRAISE
  • SUBSCRIBE
  • OPENINGS
  • SUBMISSIONS
  • CONTACT
The Missing Slate - For the discerning reader
  • HOME
  • Magazine
  • In This Issue
  • Literature
    • Billy Luck
      Billy Luck
    • To the Depths
      To the Depths
    • Dearly Departed
      Dearly Departed
    • Fiction
    • Poetry
  • Arts AND Culture
    • Tramontane
      Tramontane
    • Blade Runner 2049
      Blade Runner 2049
    • Loving Vincent
      Loving Vincent
    • The Critics
      • FILM
      • BOOKS
      • TELEVISION
    • SPOTLIGHT
    • SPECIAL FEATURES
  • ESSAYS
    • A SHEvolution is Coming in Saudi Arabia
      A SHEvolution is Coming in Saudi Arabia
    • Paxi: A New Business Empowering Women in Pakistan
      Paxi: A New Business Empowering Women in Pakistan
    • Nature and Self
      Nature and Self
    • ARTICLES
    • COMMENTARY
    • Narrative Nonfiction
  • CONTESTS
    • Pushcart Prize 2017 Nominations
      Pushcart Prize 2017 Nominations
    • Pushcart Prize 2016 Nominations
      Pushcart Prize 2016 Nominations
    • Pushcart Prize 2015 Nominations
      Pushcart Prize 2015 Nominations
    • PUSHCART 2013
    • PUSHCART 2014
Commentary, EssaysSeptember 2, 2013

Love in the Time of Statistics

Unfortunately though, this unpredictability goes two ways.  Anyone playing against Pakistan would also, by a strange, inexplicable symbiotic miracle, become unpredictable. The best bowlers on the opposing team would struggle to find the Pakistani team’s Achilles heel, ceding run upon run, but then their average, part-time pacers would end up demolishing the complete Pakistani batting order (a la Shane Watson and his Lord’s honour board in July 2010). Or Pakistani bowlers would vanquish the opposing team’s entire batting order, only to be tripped up as one of the bowlers batted his way to an uncharacteristic all time high test score (as Stuart Broad did in August 2010, scoring 169). Pakistan’s natural fickleness somehow renders the most consistently awful or consistently brilliant of teams unpredictable, as we learned once again when Zimbabwe beat us last week.

Thanks to this unpredictability, I developed a hatred for statistics, averages and everything that had to do with numerically measuring the team’s performance.  Every time a Pakistani player who usually averaged 40 runs per game was bowled out on the first ball, I’d feel betrayed. When a completely hopeless draft suddenly ended up scoring a century, I’d have to bite my tongue and swallow all my criticism. Slowly, this irrational hatred grew into a subtle increase in delusion and the complete abandonment of anything even remotely related to reason. I simply stopped checking statistics, knowing that they had nothing to do with what could happen in the future of the team I supported. They were just a list of numbers that a player would look back on as his career waned, thinking, “Wow, I was awful.” [pullquote] Thanks to this unpredictability, I developed a hatred for statistics, averages and everything that had to do with numerically measuring the team’s performance. [/pullquote]

Once the statistics had been abandoned, my status as a supporter made me akin to the kind of delusional romantic found in ancient Persian poetry, roaming the streets at night in search of his beloved. The kind of beloved you would make a thousand excuses for, when the whole world can see that she’s missing a few teeth and frankly, that she could use a shower, because the important thing is you love her and ultimately that is all that has ever mattered. The thousands of faults apparent to the world are minor obstacles to you, obstacles easily left behind, all on the road to some abstract concept of “something amazing”. Of course, no one really knows what that elusive “something amazing” is. Perhaps the team winning the World T-20, or the whitewash of England came close. Perhaps those were it. Only time will tell.

Based on the commonplace national strategy of young men sending women near illegible Facebook messages, typed in a mix of uppercase and lowercase letters, and expecting a reply, many would consider it obvious that Pakistan is indeed a country of hopeless, delusional romantics. Only a country full of delusional romantics would allow someone like erstwhile captain Shahid Afridi to have such a prolonged cricketing career, showering him with the kind of worship reserved for war heroes, when every expectation of him doing “something amazing” is met with a disastrous letdown (a rare occurrence that is backed up by statistics over the past couple of years). Yet still, deep within even the most cynical of Pakistani fans, no matter what the numbers say and no matter how impossible the task at hand, there is a sense of hope that Pakistan will somehow, magically pull through, be it through divine intervention, dodgy umpiring, or even just the other team miraculously choking like never before. It is that hope, so rarely rewarded, that makes supporting a team so worthwhile, and it is something that no batting average, no statistic and no average can ever explain.

 

Hammad Ali is an engineering student. When not failing academically, he makes poorly drawn comics & doodles for The Hamster Chronicles.

 

Continue Reading

← 1 2 View All

Tags

CricketessaysHammad AliopinionStatistics

Share on

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Pinterest
  • Google +
  • LinkedIn
  • Email
Previous articleLetters to Strangers: Shifting Allegiances
Next articleA Life Worth Living?

You may also like

A SHEvolution is Coming in Saudi Arabia

Paxi: A New Business Empowering Women in Pakistan

Nature and Self

Ad

In the Magazine

A Word from the Editor

Don’t cry like a girl. Be a (wo)man.

Why holding up the women in our lives can help build a nation, in place of tearing it down.

Literature

This House is an African House

"This house is an African house./ This your body is an African woman’s body..." By Kadija Sesay.

Literature

Shoots

"Sapling legs bend smoothly, power foot in place,/ her back, parallel to solid ground,/ makes her torso a table of support..." By Kadija Sesay.

Literature

A Dry Season Doctor in West Africa

"She presses her toes together. I will never marry, she says. Jamais dans cette vie! Where can I find a man like you?" By...

In the Issue

Property of a Sorceress

"She died under mango trees, under kola nut/ and avocado trees, her nose pressed to their roots,/ her hands buried in dead leaves, her...

Literature

What Took Us to War

"What took us to war has again begun,/ and what took us to war/ has opened its wide mouth/ again to confuse us." By...

Literature

Sometimes, I Close My Eyes

"sometimes, this is the way of the world,/ the simple, ordinary world, where things are/ sometimes too ordinary to matter. Sometimes,/ I close my...

Literature

Quarter to War

"The footfalls fading from the streets/ The trees departing from the avenues/ The sweat evaporating from the skin..." By Jumoke Verissimo.

Literature

Transgendered

"Lagos is a chronicle of liquid geographies/ Swimming on every tongue..." By Jumoke Verissimo.

Fiction

Sketches of my Mother

"The mother of my memories was elegant. She would not step out of the house without her trademark red lipstick and perfect hair. She...

Fiction

The Way of Meat

"Every day—any day—any one of us could be picked out for any reason, and we would be... We’d part like hair, pushing into the...

Fiction

Between Two Worlds

"Ursula spotted the three black students immediately. Everyone did. They could not be missed because they kept to themselves and apart from the rest...."...

Essays

Talking Gender

"In fact it is often through the uninformed use of such words that language becomes a tool in perpetuating sexism and violence against women...

Essays

Unmasking Female Circumcision

"Though the origins of the practice are unknown, many medical historians believe that FGM dates back to at least 2,000 years." Gimel Samera looks...

Essays

Not Just A Phase

"...in the workplace, a person can practically be forced out of their job by discrimination, taking numerous days off for fear of their physical...

Essays

The Birth of Bigotry

"The psychology of prejudice demands that we are each our own moral police". Maria Amir on the roots of bigotry and intolerance.

Fiction

The Score

"The person on the floor was unmistakeably dead. It looked like a woman; she couldn’t be sure yet..." By Hawa Jande Golakai.

More Stories

This Week on TV (July 15 – 22)

Bunheads While last week’s episode hinted at the financial disarray Fanny was in, this week the issue is brought to the forefront. Like much…

Back to top
One last love letter...

April 24, 2021

It has taken us some time and patience to come to this decision. TMS would not have seen the success that it did without our readers and the tireless team that ran the magazine for the better part of eight years.

But… all good things must come to an end, especially when we look at the ever-expanding art and literary landscape in Pakistan, the country of the magazine’s birth.

We are amazed and proud of what the next generation of creators are working with, the themes they are featuring, and their inclusivity in the diversity of voices they are publishing. When TMS began, this was the world we envisioned…

Though the magazine has closed and our submissions shuttered, this website will remain open for the foreseeable future as an archive of the great work we published and the astounding collection of diverse voices we were privileged to feature.

If, however, someone is interested in picking up the baton, please email Maryam Piracha, the editor, at [email protected].

Farewell, fam! It’s been quite a ride.

Read previous post:
Wind Shaping Thirst

"She knows how solitude vases the rose stems/ of unspoken needs." Weekend poem, by Charles F. Thielman.

Close