Having served 17 years to 2000 as the Australian cricket team chaplain, I was forever inundated with such records and statistics by all those I met who had any interest in cricket. Now engaged in Life After Cricket, little has changed at all. Everyone seems to think I am bound to be a record and statistical cricket receptacle which is not quite the case at all.
NSW Cricket earlier this year, on Friday 6 January very graciously, for my 60th birthday and honour my wife Delma and me for our many years in cricket ministry, gifted us a Corporate Box for the 4th Day's Play: Australia v India. We had twenty mission guests and I was again inundated by records and statistics. It is simply part of the sport.
Cricket is one sport whose statistics are phenomenally complex as there is a different set of statistics generated for each series of Test matches between countries.
Take for example, the two opening batsmen and statistics associated with them.
One set of cricket statistics
Some of the records and statistics:
• the number of balls faced by each opening batsman (both individually and within that specific opening partnership);
• the number of fours scored by each opening batsman (both individually and while in that opening partnership by each batsman);
• the numbers of single runs, as well as the the twos and threes; and for the more finicky addict of statistics,
• notations about the direction of each hit and from which end the ball was bowled.
And a whole lot more and all this for the opening batsman.
The same generation of numbers upon numbers, records upon records applies to each partnership down the batting order for all eleven men. It goes on and on and on and on. This set of statistics applies for each separate ground, and each team.
Little wonder it takes quite some time for the uninitiated, particularly migrants or tourists, to begin to understand or appreciate Cricket.
Sport is cultural
Sport is very cultural and this was illustrated to me in 1982 at my initiation of Ministry to Professional Athletes when attending an international sport mission conference in Hong Kong. I could count on one hand the number of people who had any idea who Australia's greatest field hockey player was, but in Australia, Ric Charlesworth was widely recognised.
Similarly 'Dr J', Julius Irving, the then greatest US basketballer of all time, was not within my orbit of knowledge. He and I chatted away but later someone pointed out his credential. This encounter was perhaps the most profound for my ministry as I realised knowledge and enjoyment of sport is based in cultural identity.
Moreover the message of Jesus over arched cultural identity. Athletes are in need of Jesus. That one single circumstance with Dr J more than any other directed my philosophy when pioneering the Sports and Leisure Ministry on my return to Australia.
A friend of a life time, Ron Ross, pointed this out in a different and more poignant manner in what is now a press article of historic acclaim in Sports Ministry, back in 1993, when writing for the Noosa Times.
Ron was at that time the Minister at Noosa Baptist Church but had been a YWAM missionary for many years and prior to that the Sports Editor for Wollongong WIN4 where I wrote the field hockey.
Perhaps the most poignant statistic of them all
The December 1993 article in the Noosa Times in Ron Ross's regular column, he noted I (Australian cricket team chaplain) was visiting my parents in Noosa.
His article was titled, "Aussie cricketers turn to chaplain". The last sentence highlights the essence of the only true eternal statistic. I will forever be honoured by this Ron Ross comment.
"Dr Mark Tronson may not be a well known hero in Noosa. But in heaven lies his achievements where they are written in capital letters."
Dr Mark Tronson is a Baptist minister (retired) who served as the Australian cricket team chaplain for 17 years (2000 ret) and established Life After Cricket in 2001. He was recognised by the Olympic Ministry Medal in 2009 presented by Carl Lewis Olympian of the Century. He has written 24 books, and enjoys writing. He is married to Delma, with four adult children and grand-children.
Mark Tronson's archive of articles can be viewed at
www.pressserviceinternational.org/mark-tronson.html