Tony Deyal IF I were Wes Hall, Chairman of the West Indies Cricket Board, I would make a deal with the players who are now demanding more money. They would get the money if they agree to have all of it wagered on the West Indies to win the World Cup. While the players are at odds with the Board, supporters and die-hard fans have the best odds they can ever get. The West Indies are now 18-1 in the betting. Australia is favourite at 13-8, South Africa is next at 5-2, followed by Pakistan (7-1), India (15-2), New Zealand (10-1) and England which is rated equally with Sri Lanka at 14-1.
The West Indies players have been saying that they can win the World Cup. If so, they should have no problem with having their money placed where their mouths are, and more than willing to back up the talk with performance. That way they can prove the bookies wrong, and their sponsors and supporters right.
The bookies are working with statistics, and statistics can be wrong. As Benjamin Disraeli, British Prime Minister and author, said, "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics." A person who relies on statistics has been described as similar to a drunk person leaning on a lamp post. It is a matter of seeking support rather than illumination. There is the story about the statistician who had his feet in an ice bucket and his head in an oven. When asked how he felt he said, "On the average, I feel just fine." There are three kinds of statisticians, those who can count and those who can't. In fact, a statistician drowned in a lake recently because he read that it averaged only six inches of water.
If statisticians are people skilled at drawing a precise line from an unwarranted assumption to a foregone conclusion, and statistics mean never having to say you're certain, why have the bookies, all hard-nosed businesspeople, placed the West Indies so far down the list? Of all the major cricket teams, only Zimbabwe at 100-1 is rated lower than the West Indies.
The answer lies mainly in the statistics. If we assume that the best West Indies One-Day International team is Gayle, Hinds, Sarwan, Lara, Chander-paul, Hooper, Samuels, Jacobs, Drakes, Dillon and Collins, their combined batting average is 308.4 runs. Sarwan has the highest all-time batting average of all West Indies cricketers - 51.04. Lara has 42.64. Ganga, Powell and Hinds are just about the same between 26 and 27.
What we have to look at, however, is the bowling. Collins, Dillon, Gayle and Lawson average between 28 and 29 per wicket. It costs Hooper 35.7 per wicket and over four runs per over. Dillon averages about 4.5 runs per over, slightly higher than Pedro Collins, and lower than Drakes at 4.8 per over. An interesting anomaly is that Lara's bowling average is 11.5 per wicket but he has not bowled enough overs for his performance to be statistically significant. What is significant is that if our five bowlers are Collins, Dillon, Drakes, Gayle and Hooper, and each gets two wickets, the other team will average 295.6 runs, very close to the West Indies average. If there are any other bowlers, like Chanderpaul, whose average is over 42, the opponents will score more runs.
The major Australian bowlers get wickets at between 22.85 (McGrath) and 25.8 (Gillespie). Potentially, Australia like the West Indies and South Africa can score over 300. The difference is the effectiveness of their bowling, their excellent fielding, and more important, the fact that they never give up.
This is one of the things that the bookmakers have factored into the odds, the inconsistency of the West Indies and their reputation for buckling under pressure. We can get by with bowlers who are not as penetrative or as accurate as Australia. Our last great all-rounder was Garfield Sobers, and we have got by, and can get by, without great all-rounders. We can even succeed with batsmen like Gayle, Hinds and Samuels who do not look for singles early in their innings. However, we cannot win without guts, without taking chances, without commitment and without belief in ourselves as cricketers or as a people.
Forget the statistics. A statistician is merely a mathematician broken down by age and sex. Forget the bookies, they have given cricket enough of a bad name and caused enough trouble already. Forget the odds and the averages. They are meant to be a baseline, a threshold and not a ceiling. Leadership at the team level and determination at the personal level are what combined to make the batting averages go up and the bowling averages go down. More, statistics can cause you to make costly errors as the bookies will find out. If you don't believe me, check out the following statistics. The Japanese eat very little fat and suffer fewer heart attacks than the British or the Americans.
On the other hand, the French eat a lot of fat and also suffer fewer heart attacks than the British or the Americans. The Japanese drink very little red wine and suffer fewer heart attacks than the British or the Americans. The Italians drink excessive amounts of red wine and also suffer fewer heart attacks than the British or the Americans. The obvious conclusion is that you can eat and drink whatever you like. It's speaking English that kills you.
Tony Deyal was last seen explaining to a friend whose heart was broken by a statistician, "When she said you were average, she was just being mean."
