The Silence of N/A: The Cricket Report That Was Completely Filled and Entirely Empty

A printer in a Chennai press box produced a sheet with twelve columns last week. All twelve were filled. Each contained two letters: N/A. At the top of the page: “Analysis complete.”

I had got up for coffee and came back to stare at that sheet for five minutes. The sixth journalist beside me — the man whose name took me three years to learn — said, without turning, “Again?” He did not need to look. He had heard it.

In cricket I have always heard the game before I read it. The roar of a wicket arrives before the replay. But this sheet was a new kind of sound: entirely full, entirely silent, entirely empty.

The fault was technical. What followed was entirely professional — and that is the real problem.

March 2026. M. Chinnaswamy Stadium, Bengaluru, the second Test against Australia, day four. Steve Smith glanced toward the dressing room for DRS guidance, umpire Nigel Llong stepped in, and by the press conference “brain fade” had entered the language. India won by 75 runs — K. L. Rahul's 90, Cheteshwar Pujara's 92, Ravindra Jadeja's 6/63. I filed nine hundred words that evening and never once mentioned the margin. My editor pushed it to the digital desk; it became our most-read cricket piece of 2026.

One sentence from that piece has stayed as my working rule: the scoreboard said one thing; his hands said another. Smith's hands, lifting toward the dressing room at that moment, spoke louder than any 75-run margin. I thought then that I had freed the game from numbers. Nine years on, it feels as though I opened a door and a great deal of rubbish came in with the air.

The decade since has brought the biggest structural change in cricket coverage: every major broadcaster now runs a data desk. Expected runs, pitch maps, win probability, spin tracking, ball-by-ball grids. The Women's Premier League began in 2026, and that same year settled a question that is no longer about rights but about broadcast quality. After the 2026 home Women's World Cup, won by India in front of packed houses, the burden of sustaining that wave falls on numbers built far from the ground.

Into this arrived a small thing — the template. A reporter's notebook used to have blank pages. A form cannot have blank cells. The blank gets filled with N/A, and once N/A is in, the form is deemed complete.

India has a second layer to this that the English press box routinely ignores. The country's largest information system is not a graphic; it is regional-language commentary. The roar in Tamil, Bangla or Marathi reaches you before any wicket is confirmed. The day analysis accepts that its most reliable source is often a man with no spreadsheet, this trade will get more honest.

In cricket's information economy, two entirely different things are now written the same way: “unknown” and “low.” The player with no data and the player with poor numbers sit in the same chair. In cricket this error is unusually expensive, because data density is distributed by team — five cameras for a Test nation, one for a Ranji side, somebody's phone for a railways team.

Last season I watched a Ranji match where six players had numbers on my phone and four did not. One of the four, a twenty-year-old left-arm spinner, bowled eighteen overs across three days and changed something nearly every over — flight, angle, pace. There was no speed gun at the ground. I had to check the scorer's book for his name. When I sent it to my editor the next morning, the reply was: “What's his data?” I said I had three days of notes. He said: “Send the data.”

The problem is not that the data is wrong. The problem is that the absence of data has been given a value. The scoreboard has always worked as a witness and I respect that witness. But a witness who claims to be everywhere has stopped being a witness. Sachin Tendulkar's hundred hundreds and Virat Kohli's chase numbers are talking points, not arguments. When they are seated where analysis should be, I ask the question I failed to ask in Bengaluru — what else was happening out there?

December 2026, Adelaide. India bowled out for 36 in the second innings. I was at home that night, radio and television running together. Thirty-six all out is not a number. It is a silence with a shape. The loudest thing that night was not the commentary; it was the empty space between two overs, when the man in the box had nothing to say and said nothing. The loudest thing Adelaide ever gave me was the sound of nothing. No form has a column for that.

The consequence is gravitational. Coverage leans toward those who already have data. Data gives you a story; a story gives you a camera; a camera gives you data. The cycle is visible inside one season — one boy out of an Under-19 tournament is auction headline material within two years, while a faster bowler from the same squad is a name on a zonal scoresheet. The auction now does the scouting zonal selectors once did, and the auction only sees what is already on a screen.

Let me be clear about my position. I am not against data. Nearly all the finest cricket writing I have read in forty-one years sat on top of a number. My objection is to the place where a number is substituted for evidence — when it is only one more witness, and usually a late one.

Now the part least heard in this argument. The entire anxiety of cricket analytics rests on one fear: bad data. Mine is the reverse. Dirty data announces itself — the holes show, an editor asks, a reader doubts. The frightening data is tidy data, whose holes hide inside the beauty of the template. N/A in a filled table does not look like a gap; it looks like a value. And once it is a value, nobody asks about it.

This is why the perennial “numbers versus the eye” debate seems to me a luxury argument. Both sides assume the data exists and only its interpretation is in question. The real divide is not interpretive but geographic — inside the frame and in the overflow room. Those arguing for the eye tend to be sitting at grounds where cameras were installed years ago. The eye, too, is a privilege.

And a word about myself, without waving a passport. When I came to this country I believed that arriving from outside let me see what insiders could not. That is half true and half excuse. What I notice does not come from birth; it comes from sitting with people who have no microphone. I have learned to wait three days before I trust my own first sentence. That is not laziness. It is a check.

One way I now apply that check: if a form has nine of twelve cells filled and three marked N/A, the question is not what to write in the three. The question is whether anyone went to a ground to fill them. Absence in cricket is never neutral. When a spinner has no data, he is called a limited-overs bowler. When a woman player's domestic record is not logged, she is called unproven. Unknown and unusable sit a slash apart on paper, and several years apart in a life.

Some will say this is a complaint about the trade, not the game. I agree, and that is precisely the point. Cricket coverage is now part of the sport, not merely its record. When a selection committee decides off a data sheet, when a franchise says “data-backed” at an auction, when a reader skims past an N/A in the morning story — that N/A has become real. Nobody on the field knows which player was written up as having an “insufficient sample.” The player knows.

The next time a report is handed to you marked “analysis complete,” ask one question — what did it go looking for, and what did it fail to find. The most dangerous cricket report is not the empty one. It is the one that looks full, so that you never feel the need to notice which voice is missing.

That sheet from the Chennai press box is still in my bag. Twelve columns, twelve N/As. I do not throw it away. The next time someone tells me the numbers explain everything, I will put it on the table and say that numbers do not lie. Sometimes they simply keep quiet — and we mistake the quiet for an answer.