The Most Dangerous Output in Cricket Is 'N/A': A Story From Inside the Data Room

One forty in the morning. Let me take you back to a WhatsApp group with eleven members. The group is still called 'Squad Notes 2026'. Eleven people: two from a franchise's performance-analysis department, a physio, an assistant coach, three scouts, a team manager, two staffers from an external data vendor, and me. That night a PDF landed in the group. Sixty-eight pages, a scouting report on a twenty-year-old batter.

Every field was there. Name, age, batting position, format, average, strike rate, home ground, away ground, injury history, recommendation. Count the boxes and the document looks complete. Then I turned to page forty-one.

Page forty-one was full. Every cell said: N/A — insufficient information, cannot assess.

In an Indian dressing room, 'N/A' does not read as a failure of arithmetic. It reads as clearance. The assistant coach glanced at the page and saw no red flag. Nine days later, when I asked what had been decided about that batter, he said there had been no issue — the report was clean. The report was not clean. The report was empty.

This piece is not an investigation into a mistake. It is an investigation into what survives a mistake — the frame of the document. Cricket now has more frames than people to fill them. The retention list is out, the purses are split, agents' phones are ringing, and nobody in that noise has asked who last signed off on the sheet the entire squad is being built from.

I am a reporter, not an analyst. But my job is what that document's job should have been: to say who is good, why, and to defend the claim. In nine years I learned the game twice — once on a maidan, once on an overnight wire. And one thing became clear: the biggest change data made to cricket was not a measurement revolution. It was a translation revolution. Where the translation broke, the sheet looked full and was empty.

Context: the public price of an auction, the private file behind it

Bengaluru, February 2026. The IPL mega auction. Six hundred players shortlisted, two hundred and four sold, ten franchises. I spent two days inside it and filed thirty-eight squad notes — not team by team, but role cluster by role cluster. Ishan Kishan returned to Mumbai Indians for fifteen crore twenty-five lakh. Deepak Chahar went to Chennai Super Kings for fourteen crore. Those figures sit in the public record and get re-cited every season.

One thing was obvious in that room. The auction hall is a room of public prices. The real work happens one floor below, in a room where private files are built. The public price is in the newspaper next morning; the private file decides the next three seasons.

A strange asymmetry has opened up. There are many people keeping track of price — purse, retention, overseas slots, Right to Match cards, ten fan-pressure points across ten teams. Almost nobody is talking about the quality of the document that decides who gets discussed at that price.

Around 2026, scouting was a zonal, eyes-based trade. One man, one notebook, four grounds. Today it is a pipeline: live feed, third-party vendor, a room with three people in it, a sheet with a hundred and seventy columns. The upside is obvious — a hundred and seventy columns in which three are filled were, previously, three columns nobody had. The downside is equally obvious: the pipeline does not know what it dropped.

I made three calls. First to the analyst who built the sheet, a twenty-four-year-old employee in Pune whose company started in ticketing data and now holds sports-performance contracts. He said the feed had been down for nine days, the system assumed no matches had been played, and every column filled in its default value. Second to the assistant coach, who said he only reads the recommendation column, the rest is not his job. Third to the scorer who had actually counted those matches — who asked why nobody had told him, because the games were written in his register in ink, pages eleven to nineteen.

The story is not that the system failed. The story is that when it failed, it did not give a wrong answer — it gave no answer, and no answer was read as an answer.

I have an old yardstick for this. In 2026, in Class 11, I ran a WhatsApp newsletter called The Maidan Report on Mumbai's Harris Shield. I verified forty-six scorecards from nine schools and kept handwritten over-by-over notes on Rizvi Springfield's semi-final run. The most useful thing in those scorecards was never a deep model. It was the scorer's name. If you know the scorer's name, you know whose eyes watched that day's cricket in its actual conditions.

Now imagine one field in those scorecards going blank and nobody noticing. At sixteen you assume a blank field means something good. At twenty-five you still assume it — except now it happens in the most expensive rented room in Indian sport.

Core: four places where emptiness gets in

The source of the error is never the model. The source is that a number from one format is placed in the same row as a number from another format, a bridge is built between them, and then a decision is made to stand on that bridge.

One: format contamination. In T20 the powerplay, overs one to six, is a real rule — only two fielders outside the ring. Strike rates there are built on a freedom that is legally unavailable elsewhere. Then the middle-over squeeze, then the death overs, sixteen to twenty, where the bowler is pushed towards the yorker. Test cricket inverts all of it: two new balls, but across eighty or ninety overs; the climb after eighty overs; the follow-on decision; a DRS call that changes with next morning's cloud. ODIs add two new balls, middle-over reverse swing and a mandatory final-ten acceleration. And if it rains, Duckworth-Lewis-Stern rewrites the target with no personal history attached to the batter at all.

A model that does not know which sport it is watching cannot give useful advice. It can only give confidence. And confidence is the cheapest commodity in cricket.

Two: the small-sample spell. A nineteen-year-old makes ninety-six and seventy-one in two innings. The sheet records the number twice; a week later it becomes a sentence — 'this is the next big thing'. I know that sentence well because it is the most frequently written joke in my own trade. Two reasons. First, the surface. Second, the quality of the bowling. Three innings against a bowling attack with no pace, on a fresh morning, is eighty runs of imagery and zero information.

I am not saying small-sample predictions turn out wrong. I am saying a small-sample prediction can turn out right or wrong, which is exactly why turning out right is not evidence. Until you can say who was bowling, on which ground, in what weather, the number is only a number. The 2026 Under-19 World Cup final taught me this. India beat Australia by eight wickets, Manjot Kalra made a hundred and one not out, Prithvi Shaw captained. That is a hard historical fact. But filing eleven pieces that night taught me that one final innings and seven league innings are not the same object — and in the scouting sheet both go into the same drawer, because the drawer is filled by numbers, not by minutes.

Three: the home ground. This is one of cricket's oldest lies and data did not end it; it scaled it. A batter averages sixty-one at home in the Ranji Trophy and twenty-eight away. Both numbers are correct. If only one goes into the file, only one goes into the selection meeting. Surface, weather and the quality of domestic bowling all hide inside that two-number gap. Cricket's home-away differential is among the widest in professional sport — that sounds like common sense, and yet the file-maker compresses it into a single column.

One thing must be added here. The home-away gap is not only about the pitch. It is about travel — the bus, the hotel, the temperature, the breakfast hour, the distance from family, the absence of a cook who knows your plate. Thirty-four phone calls taught me that the story was never about the silence; it was about the people the silence left no room for. The same logic applies to a domestic average.

Four: price placed in the same column as strength. Ishan Kishan's fifteen crore twenty-five lakh was not a certificate of cricketing excellence. It was a franchise saying it needed an Indian wicketkeeper-batter, in a specific role, at a specific position in the order, at a specific point on the age curve — and it needed him at any price. Deepak Chahar's fourteen crore said the same thing: Chennai needed an Indian seamer who swings the new ball, and that was the price of the scarcity. When someone says the most expensive buy proves a player's supremacy, I read the sentence in market language, not cricket language. A high bid is the price of a need, not a ranking of a player. Putting the two in one column is the same category error we used to make with formats, only now it is written in rupees.

There is one piece of auction machinery that is the most moral and the least understood: Right to Match. It lets the previous franchise match the top bid. From that moment, price stops being an independent signal. Other people's deep pockets and the previous team's retention policy are both inside the number — and we still read it like a public record.

The people of the domestic pyramid whose names never reach the sheet

Of all the rooms I have stood in over nine years, the emptiest is the one where a player is told why his contract was not renewed. The fullest is the one where that decision is prepared. Behind the file that decides whether a man stays is someone who does not know his name will never appear in it.

I read a first-class cricketer the way an economist reads a worker. Match fees, contracts, travel allowances — these are the numbers that never make the chart. What passes through a Ranji player's pockets in a full season can be smaller than a single bid at a major auction. That gap is not a sad story; it is the shape of a workforce. And inside that shape, contract security has a brutally simple arithmetic: how many seasons, how many matches, how many injuries, and what comes after.

One pattern repeats. When a player's contract ends, the first call goes to the agent, the second to an assistant coach, the third — if he is lucky — to a state association official. In that chain sits a twelfth man who is neither batter nor bowler: the man whose job is the paperwork. And that paperwork is, mostly, exactly what the analyst is trusting. That is where a feed breaks and nobody looks.

So my first question in any scouting meeting is not what the player averages. It is who counted this, when, and whether they had a second route to the same figure. I know it sounds boring. Boring questions are the ones that save a file.

Contrarian: this is not a data revolution, it is a translation revolution

Here is the part not everyone will accept.

From outside, the last decade looks like teams got better at measuring players. I think that diagnosis is wrong, or at least incomplete. The measurement technology already existed — how fast a bowler is, where a batter should bat, we knew. What changed is that a result produced by technology now has to be carried to a man sitting far from the technology.

So the teams that won were not the ones with the better models. They were the ones where the analyst and the coach could argue for twenty minutes without politeness. That sounds small. It is the whole thing. In a room where an analyst can say 'this number is useless' and the coach does not take it personally, the blank rows of a pipeline cannot hurt anyone. In a room where an analyst cannot speak against the coach's favourite player, that same blank row becomes 'no red flag'.

Second contrarian reading: the empty sheet was not the model failing. It was the model being honest. It said: I have no data, so I cannot assess. That is the behaviour we demand in journalism. A system that says 'I do not know' is far better than one that guesses. The real fault was not in the sheet. It was in the column added below the sheet — the composite score. When you add four blank numbers and produce a filled one, you have not created information. You have created trust, and trust cannot be recalled.

There is something here that stings most about cricket, and it applies to my own trade. When a decision is questioned, both sides reach for the same shield: 'the process was correct.' DRS 'umpire's call' is the purest example. When ball-tracking falls inside the technology's error margin, the on-field decision stands. Technically that is rational and the sport needs it. But for the spectator it is a two-minute wait in which he is told: we know, but only this much. A wicket celebration cools inside two minutes. That is not a technology error; it is the gap between the technology's tempo and the game's rhythm. The game says now. The technology says shortly, accurately.

Which is my second disagreement with analytics. The problem is not that numbers entered the dressing room. The problem is that they arrived at their own tempo while the match is played at another. The rhythm of an innings is what no column captures — the two quiet overs that made a bowler start thinking, the spell that broke, the wicketkeeper's half-step forward that changed an entire drive. Data does not capture rhythm; it captures the marks rhythm leaves. The beat is not the noise; it is what keeps time underneath it.

What to watch next

I will not advise watching a column on the retention list. Watch role clarity instead — who was signed for which job, and who was signed without the job being defined. The biggest failure this season will not show up in an expensive player's numbers. It will show up in the player given two roles and therefore none.

And the next time a squad-building story breaks, ask the question I now ask in every room. Who recorded this number, and who picked up the phone when the feed dropped. If the answer is nobody, you already know that whatever is written in that sheet for the next nine days will not be true. It will only be full.

The transfer is a headline; the phone call is the story. And this time the phone call is asking why, when we had nothing to say, we showed it as filled in.