By the time you are reading these words, the ICC Twenty20 World Cup will be old news, the voracious appetite of the money-making machine that is world cricket ensuring that the conveyor belt of matches continues to move without a hitch or interruption—the moment one spectacle finishes another is starting.
Written On The Water
Highlight reels and commemorative documentaries aside, soon enough the tournament will become just another entry in the scorebooks, the blood, sweat and tears (and beers), the player milestones, and even the results, will have been distilled down into no more than black ink on a page. All that time and passion and effort and living summed up in such a condensed space.
In the end, those figures will be the only mark they make on the history of the game. It doesn’t matter how many times you beat the edge or the number of catches that should have been a wicket got dropped, it’s what is in the scorebook that counts.
No matter how valiant a loss or nail-biting a finish, a win is a win and nothing else counts. A hundred made with glorious invulnerability and dazzling stroke play will be recorded in the book just the same as one that should have ended on a duck, and someone looking back years later might never know which was which.
The Conviction Of Things Not Seen
But, even though cricket is a game obsessed with statistics, with careers devoted to collecting every possible piece of data, and making numbers the markers used to chart every milestone in a player's career (in some cases becoming indelibly associated in the public’s mind with a player and becoming a symbol of something more—how many people know what Bradman’s average was despite not knowing what an average is?), there is also much more to the game that cannot be quantified.
If you input every statistic ever recorded in order to calculate how to maximise your success playing the game what came out would be based on incomplete data. You would find that the result was often influenced by factors you had not accounted for.
You might be able to plan according to the figures recorded against batsmen and bowlers and grounds and innings, but how do you plan for a full-capacity ground screaming their support for your opponent? Or a player who decides this is the day he will play the innings of a lifetime or take a freak catch that should have been safe?
The Search For The Ineffable
Anyone who believes that cricket is simply a matter of statistics. That the answer to everything you need to know about cricket can be found in them, can never truly understand cricket. They may be a relentless player or coach, but ultimately they will never be able to go beyond a certain point. They will always fall short of those who find greatness.
A robot may be able to produce amazing reproductions of masterpieces if they are programmed with the right data, but they will never produce a new work that transcends what has gone before and captures something unquantifiable.
Who Can Hold The Wind In His Hands?
It is not just on the oval that cricket taps into things that cannot be bound by processes and regulations, or rendered down to a marketing formula and created at will. Any attempts to artificially invoke them are instinctively recognised for what they are.
There are no set conditions that you can predict will combine in just the right way to get a certain result. But when that critical mix of factors converges at the right moment it takes on a momentum of its own. In turn it creates something that carries everything along with it.
No Fate But What They Make
The 2005 Ashes was a cruel mismatch on paper, and all the numbers proved indisputably that it was impossible for Australia to lose. But, intangible factors like the hunger of England, that serenely unassailable aura of confidence of Pietersen, and the irresistible forces that seemed to channel themselves through the vessel that was Freddie Flintoff. All mixed and combined with the passion of a whole country and the hubris of fading greats to create one of the greatest sporting contests of all time and an atmosphere you could almost cut with a knife.
Despite the feeling of destiny slowly but inexorably pressing down on Australia as every possible circumstance seemed to conspire against them, one player almost turned back the tide single-handedly. Refusing to acknowledge the normal laws of the games, he shrugged off such mortal concerns as mere statistics and the laws of probability. Shane Warne showed that the true greats can impose their will on a game and feed off the moment, sensing those things that cannot be seen or measured but nevertheless can change the course of a game.
Bigger Than Border
At the most recent T20 World Cup, the results and stats are insignificant in the long term, There will be other finals winners, bigger scores, tighter finishes. It is what isn't recorded in the archives that showed what cricket is really about, it was to be found in those things the figures are blind to.
It was found in a stadium at the sporting heart of one country packed full of fans from two other countries that glare at each other across divisions of every possible kind—political, religious, cultural, historical—and are never far from conflict erupting between them.
And yet, there they were, even for a few hours, united by a shared passion that has against all odds been able to transcend all these barriers and provided a common ground where they can at least begin to find more.
What Do They Know of Cricket, Who Only Cricket Know?
That is what Cricket is. It is not runs, or wickets, or catches, or even wins. It is not the ICC trying to generate new ways of getting crowds excited or watching sport for the sake of watching sport.
It is semi-professionals managing to beat a team of millionaires, or a player batting through pain that leaves him barely able to see hanging on for hours and hours for a draw. It is a player who has been written off as too old or too fat or too soft coming out and playing the greatest innings of his life, or a batsman who statistically should only score 3 ending up on a double century.
It is forcing political change, and standing up against injustice. It is being the only thing binding together countries that have nothing else in common and everything else keeping them apart. It is giving a country a sense of pride and a source of hope during a Depression, or forcing integration, or simply providing a place that a community can coalesce around.
It's just Cricket.
David Goodwin is the former Editor of The Salvation Army’s magazine,War Cry. He is also a cricket tragic, and an unapologetic geek.
David Goodwin archive of articles may be viewed at http://www.pressserviceinternational.org/david-goodwin.html
