The N/A Column: The Cricket No Sheet Records

A sheet arrived on my desk last week. Seven columns, every one of them filled, and not a single usable piece of information in the whole document. Title: N/A. Source: N/A. One-sentence summary: blank. The list of information points: an empty list. Units, time sensitivity, source quality: all unavailable. And still the paper looked complete, because its skeleton was complete. Only one label carried anything: cricket_asia. It told me the sport. It told me nothing about the game.

I have seen that document before — not on paper, but at a ground. 13 March 2026, Eden Gardens. The scorecard from that night is still available and it is not wrong. Chasing 251, India were 98 for 1; Sachin Tendulkar fell for 65; the next seven wickets went down for 22 runs; the side collapsed to 120 for 8 in the 34th over; and match referee Clive Lloyd awarded the semi-final to Sri Lanka. Every number is in its place. The one column missing from that sheet is the one that would have recorded the groundstaff sweeping glass at one in the morning. The ground did not fall silent; it emptied — and emptying is not a field anyone tabulates.

That night I was 31, the second man on a Bangalore sports desk, sent to Calcutta because someone else had flu, with a borrowed laptop. My master's was in kinesiology, so I was watching Tendulkar's trigger movement. What I remember is not the trigger movement. What I remember is the glass being swept at one in the morning, in a ground that had forgotten how to make noise.

Cricket has never lacked numbers. What it has lacked is a settled answer to who decides which numbers get counted. When I was on the print Ranji beat in the late 1980s, the scorebook was filled by hand and the correspondent had four hundred words; everything else stayed in a notebook that was never printed. Today there is a ball-by-ball feed, a wagon wheel, a pitch map, and a franchise shortlist where zonal scouting used to be. The information has grown. The beat has shrunk. Outside the knockout weeks, Ranji coverage is as thin as it ever was, except now there is a camera in the room.

Two dates are worth holding up as the triumph of the tabulated. 27 and 28 January 2026, a ballroom in Bengaluru. On the first day of the IPL mega auction, KL Rahul went to Kings XI Punjab for ₹11 crore and Jaydev Unadkat to Rajasthan Royals for ₹11.5 crore. Those figures are verified, they ran on a ticker, and nobody forgets them. The second date is 18 July 2026, the Lodha Committee report; the Supreme Court had constituted the committee in January 2026 and its order came on 2 January 2026. That era did not leave us short of documents. It simply never told us where the people who kept the game's accounts had gone.

19 January 2026. I called the fourth Test from a Bangalore studio at five in the morning, because the pandemic had put the world on a screen and the Gabba sat at reduced capacity. India chased 328 with a bowling attack holding fewer than a dozen Test caps between them. Mohammed Siraj had already taken 5 for 73 in the first innings. In that first innings, Washington Sundar and Shardul Thakur put on 123 for the seventh wicket. Then Shubman Gill made 91, and Rishabh Pant finished 89 not out.

The passage I still cannot read aloud without stopping is that seventh-wicket stand. Whichever model was built before the match had its experience field almost empty — and the match was won precisely where the model had no column. The partnership that wins a match is usually absent from the metric that was designed before it.

December 2026. The game had been in the gutter all year — Hansie Cronje's confessions in April, the Delhi Police sting in July, Mohammad Azharuddin's life ban in December. On Residency Road a middleman slid a photocopied transcript across a table and asked me to run it as fact with his name left out. It named three players I had no way to verify. I sat on it for eleven days. My editor was pushing, my stomach was pulling, and a rival outlet ran a version first. I lost the story and a month of bylines. I kept the transcript because publishing it would have been a second sin.

What needs saying here is that the record of that period now looks clean — and that is the difficulty. What was never filed is absent from the archive, and absence gets read as exoneration. The empty part of any archive is not proof of innocence; it only tells you that no column existed for it at the time. The spot-fixing case files of May 2026 carry the same shape. What was written down was true, and so was what was not.

On the second day of the 2026 auction I counted something the ticker never showed: eleven seconds, on average, for an unsold player to stand up and walk out of frame. In those eleven seconds nobody said his name, nobody asked his age, nobody mentioned how many balls he had faced in the last Ranji season. His name is on the sheet, with an empty space after it. A career can go unsold while a room keeps bidding on its silence.

Let me be clear that I am not writing the unsold player as an object of sympathy. An unsold chair is still a seat at the table of someone — the same table where next season's squad gets picked. The scout who spent six years watching zonal cricket now has his judgement settled in a franchise's two-day meeting. The sheet has a column for sold and unsold. It has no column for why.

The danger is not the empty sheet. The danger is the sheet that looks full. The system that put seven columns in front of me wrote N/A in every one of them, and it still presented as a report, because the skeleton held. The same thing happens in a dressing room. An analyst cannot reach a conclusion outside the field list handed to him. If the list carries run-a-ball 45 and does not carry what the innings cost, two entirely different innings look identical.

I get accused of being against data. I am not against data; I am against the claim that more columns deliver more truth. A metric that measures a player's running, his intensity, his balls per minute is measuring athletics, not thought. And a conclusion cut off from the rhythm of the match is not a conclusion; it is a guess in the shape of a graph.

My own caution comes from the same rule — I do not accept atmosphere as proof. That night at Eden, the atmosphere was saying a great deal. The proof was the scorecard and the next morning's paper. So my advice is not to go back to the notebook. My advice is to publish the field list.

The next time a report looks complete, do not ask what is written in it. Ask which column was deliberately left blank. My concrete proposal is small: add two lines to every first-class innings sheet — how many reporters sat in the press box that day, and how many people were in the stands. Both numbers can be counted, both can be filed, and both will tell you whom the game remembers. The rest goes into the column whose heading has not yet been decided.