Sunday Times
TELFORD VICE, Johannesburg
Ask Andrew Samson how many left-arm fast bowlers have taken a wicket with their right bootlaces untied after tea on a Thursday in a first-class match played between the 27th and 83rd parallels, and he will sigh, stifle a roll of his eyes, and say with apparently effortless calm:
“Twelve, excluding the bloke who was called for chucking in the Outer Hebrides. Actually, he did it with the fourth ball of the last over of a second session that was lengthened because 49 minutes had been lost to rain before the start of play. So, technically, it probably wouldn’t have counted.”
Samson will not say that. But only because such oddities have not been counted. If the answer to that question could be known, Samson would know it. Or he would know how to reel it in from the sea of statistics that cricket generates.
The game’s data is defended by an army of - mostly - men who bristle with number-tipped missiles, each more deadly dull than the last. Among them are cricket’s tragics, trainspotters who have missed life’s last train to social acceptance.
But not all are misfits, proof of which is the decision by the Association of Cricket Statisticians and Historians (ACS) to declare someone as untragic as Samson to be the best among them.
The ACS - which is based in England but is the worldwide authority on all things numbers-related in cricket - have named Samson the “Cricket Statistician of the Year” for 2013.
Was Samson’s reward to compile the stats of a pile of prizemoney?
“No,” he said. “There’s a trophy, but I didn’t get to keep it. I did get a tankard.”
Ah. To sink a beer from.
“Umm, no. I think it’s for putting on display.”
That’s until his daughters, Charlotte, 6, and Hailey, 4, spot it and fill it with play dough. Which would horrify Samson’s beancounter brethren, but perhaps not as much as the fact that he is a house husband.
“She has a real job,” Samson said of his wife, Carolien, an economist. “Someone’s got to earn a living in this house.”
But even that would go down better than the awful truth that Samson is an aficionado of the game that shall not be spoken of around the purists. That’s right, cricket lovers, he is a baseball fan and a member of the Society for American Baseball Research.
Baseball, Samson said, could teach cricket a thing or two about how to use stats: “They rely a lot on numbers. They use more in-depth data.”
Samson roots for the Boston Red Sox, who famously did not win the World Series between 1918 and 2004.
“I picked them because they were the team who never won,” he said. “As soon as I started supporting them, they started winning World Series. That may be a co-incidence.”
Cricket that has been the 50-year-old Samson’s major sporting interest since he was a boy. He started scoring because “I was pretty rubbish at playing cricket, so I gave up in Std. 9”.
Early in 1988, Armed with an honours in statistics from Cape Town University, Samson’s own career stats improved in a telephone call to Gerald de Kock - who had replaced the retired Charles Fortune as the SABC’s senior cricket commentator. With Fortune went his scorer, John Landau.
“I asked Gerald if he needed a scorer,” Samson said. “He didn’t know any better, and said yes.”
Twenty-six years on, Samson has been the official statistician at four global tournaments. He works in commentary boxes around the cricket world - including for the BBC’s Test Match Special - supplies stats to Wisden, and has been Cricket South Africa’s official statistician for 20 years.
His experiences have informed his opinion on a range of cricket subjects. For instance, why does he prefer radio to television?
“On TV, they like to put up tables on the screen. On radio, you simply say, ‘That’s the highest score by a left-hander in March’. Sometimes that will spark other conversations, whereas on TV you move on to the next table. Radio is more fun while TV is very structured. They have all these toys and gadgets that they’ve got to use, and if they have a new toy they have to use it all the time.”
Which are the worst and best grounds to work from?
“The worst was the toilet at Lord’s in 1994. I was working for Afrikaans radio and we were in a cramped little room that used to be a toilet. You could hardly see the ground. The best view is in PE.”
What is the future of test cricket?
“Those of us who like test cricket think it’s the proper way to play cricket. That’s misguided, because we all know what people want to watch. Test cricket will just fade away quietly, but it will last longer in England and Australia. The Ashes are a huge national thing; it’s not just about cricket.”
How many tests has he covered? He did not need to look that up: “175.”
One-day internationals? A small pause: “Lots.”
T20 internationals? A kneejerk: “As few as possible.”
Does he watch every ball of every match he covers?
“To be honest, I don’t - I’m usually looking up some kind of stat.”
When Samson started scoring, pen and paper was the state of the art equipment. The internet has led to a revolution in his craft, and he has the details of more than 100 000 matches in his database: “Every international game, every first-class game, every women’s international, every under-19 international ...
“There are a lot more stats now. The internet makes it easier to record information, but expectations are higher.”
Like people who want to know how many left-arm fast bowlers have taken a wicket with their right bootlaces untied.
“Actually, if you go back to old scorebooks from the 19th century, there are lists of unusual occurrences ...”
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