Love in the Time of Statistics

By Hammad Ali

Growing up, I’d always harboured a special love for the simple predictability and reliability of numbers. A 6 will never magically turn into a 10 without reason, nor will a subtraction sign break your heart and turn into an addition sign. Numbers, statistics, maths — these were all simple, predictable. So initially, when my love affair with sports first began, this passion for statistics only grew. I began speaking in batting averages, bowling averages and strike rates, studying them with a diligence my mother still wishes I’d invested in schoolwork instead. In my childlike naivety, I believed that in knowing these stats, I could predict the results of the sport I was watching. I thought memorizing every statistic available on a certain team or player would somehow help me predict how they would perform. My motivation, not surprisingly, was completely selfish — I enjoyed walking around with a smug smile on my face, telling people that they were wasting time and energy with their misplaced hope for players and teams numerically doomed to underperform. I relished that hint of moral superiority; the kind a vaguely self-righteous man feels when he wakes up to pray at dawn, then walks to the mosque to make sure everyone knows what a grand sacrifice he has made.

Of course, this all happened before I gave my heart to the one team that would make a habit of breaking it: the Pakistani cricket team.

My love affair with sports began slow and steady: a casual amusement, an enjoyable distraction. Somewhere along the way, though, this was replaced with a strange sense of “patriotism”. It was oddly thrilling, getting sucked into the competition as 11 men performed in an international arena clad in the bright green of our flag. The feverish, rabid obsession of everyone else’s love for the national team started to rub off onto me. I especially found a role model in one man: Inzamam-Ul-Haq. Inzamam represented everything I could believe in and look up to: a nice, somewhat quiet, moderately heavy set guy who’d somehow made a name for himself as an international athlete in a sport that favoured the quick, lanky and brash. Plus, most importantly, he was predictable in his performance; managing to come out brilliant just about every time he came on to the pitch. (This might not be true but I have the absurd habit of only remembering the good things about the teams and players I love).

[pullquote] I enjoyed walking around with a smug smile on my face, telling people that they were wasting their time and energy with their misplaced hope for players and teams numerically doomed to underperform. [/pullquote] There was something I had not accounted for as I became more and more invested in our cricket team though: Pakistan is, and always has been, an anomaly in the world of statistics. They were the undisputed world champions at being utterly unpredictable, regardless of what their statistics and years of experience might say. If you were to pick out a stranger who’s never heard of cricket and hand him a bat , then have him face one of the best bowlers in the world, there is more than a 90% chance he’s going to miss. Put that same person in a Pakistani jersey, throw him in the spotlight, and you’d have the same success rate, if not worse. But you’d be foolish to bet against him, because you simply can’t predict when that measly, unexpected anomaly will occur. You never know when the tables will turn, and those 150 runs will magically grow into 230 in the space of 10 overs, without relinquishing a single wicket. You won’t know what hit you when, against all odds, he’ll end up demolishing one of the world’s best batting lineups in the metaphorical blink of an eye. Only someone from the Pakistani team could achieve that.

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.