A fact need not be a statistic

The British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli (1804-81) is credited with saying there were three kinds of lies: “lies, damned lies and statistics”, so clearly he wasn’t fond of the latter.

But they’re not always misleading – they’re often just irrelevant.

If a minority political party has never held power even though it has existed for 50 years, that doesn’t mean that eventually it will. It might be argued, though, that as the US has just elected a non-politician as president, anything can happen.

But don’t switch off; that is the last mention of anything even vaguely political, because as regular readers know, that is not this column’s bag at all.

What has led to the dramatic increase in the profile of statistics is simple: computers are very good at generating them. While the statisticians used to have to spend hours thumbing through books and documents to bring us irrelevances – and therefore usually didn’t bother – computers can do it in an instant.

Statistics can be used to provide factoids about anything you want – and nowadays certain publications and websites seem incapable of putting a story together without giving it some pointless, simplistic context.

Last week, for instance, West Indies won a test match against Pakistan in Sharjah. Two things are notable about that.

First, it was in Sharjah, which is in the United Arab Emirates, and the UAE is not really a cricket-playing country. Pakistan are playing their “home” international matches abroad at the moment because of the fear of terrorist attacks if they are played within their own borders.

These things are facts.

The second notable aspect is that it was the first time West Indies have won a test away from home since 2007 (except against Bangladesh and Zimbabwe, who are traditionally not much good and therefore don’t count). That too is a fact, but it is also a statistic. It doesn’t just report an event; it seeks to tell us more.

Home teams have an advantage in many sports, and cricket particularly, because they are familiar with the conditions: the weather, the stadium and in cricket’s case the way the surface will behave: whether it will be docile and comfortable for the batsmen or lively and unpredictable, which helps the bowlers.

So the fact that WI won away from home is quite a big deal, even if the length of time since they last achieved it is a bit embarrassing.

This news came to my attention on ESPNcricinfo, but the headline pointed us in a different direction. It said “Kraigg Brathwaite opens new test record”, which combines a pun (Brathwaite is an opener, i.e. one of the two batsmen who go in first) with a statistic that has nothing to do with his team’s victory. What he achieved was to be not out in both innings, with 142 in the first and 60 in the second.

With all due respect to Mr B, even as a cricket fan, your correspondent found this rather underwhelming.

A century is always cause for celebration, but I’m sure even Kraigg’s Mum isn’t too excited about the two not-outs business. What happened in this instance is that someone on the cricinfo desk noticed this statistic and decided it was more important than the real story.

To take this obsession with statistics a step further, one could point out that Brathwaite is also the first opening batsman called Craig - from any country - to have his name spelled with a k and two g’s. Now that’s a stat that seems to have escaped the cricket media completely.

If our lives are reduced to lists of what we have and haven’t done, it is inescapable that some will seem more exciting than others. While we might normally think we’ve done all right for ourselves in a modest way, put our personal CV alongside that of Sir Richard Branson or Usain Bolt and suddenly it doesn’t seem so impressive.

But if we take the time to think about it, any of us can come up with stats that make us unique. I, for instance, in 2013 was the first journalist to sit in a certain other journalist’s seat in the press box at the Tobago House of Assembly for 13 years – at least I think that’s what he told me as he shooed this new boy away from his territory. How about you? Perhaps you were the first Costcutter customer ever to put a Toblerone and a bag of dried fish in the same basket.

If so, all you need to do is hang around as long as it takes for that to become important, and hey presto: you’re a celebrity.