by Arunabha Sengupta

Numbers often mystify.
It is not only cricket fans that they mystify. The real world is full of figures that allow us to make sense of it. The problem is that not all of us are endowed with the knack of interpreting a series of digits into tangible conclusions.

And when it becomes as important as salary, red blood cell count, projected sales and such palpably important aspects of life, that moronic counter ‘numbers don’t give the whole picture’ cannot come to the rescue any more … as it does for cricket fans trying to rescue their beliefs from the jaws of evidence.

However, irrespective of that standard recourse to deliberate data-blindness professed by many cricket fans, the game is tailor-made to be a magnificent gateway to understand numbers. With the feature of being composed of individual events (deliveries) with numerical outcomes in the form of runs and/or wickets, cricket is ideally placed to demonstrate how these numbers, properly represented and displayed as graphs and pictures, can make our understanding of the events of the game – and by extension of the world – better by huge factors.

And that is precisely how Ramya Mylavarapu and Richie Lionell V proceed to use the game in their excellent primer From Data to Stories.

Cloaked in a simple tale of four family members during the 2019 World Cup, the slim volume shows how every event in a cricket match can be represented as pictures that make the numbers come to life, making clear that the insights and understanding thus obtained would have been hard to come by otherwise. Every match played by India during the tournament is depicted by a series of images, histograms denoting the overs, each over further broken down into deliveries, the important events highlighted in the data and linked to the reactions of the protagonists, insightful nuggets captured within one page numerical and graphical summaries of the action.

All through, the authors take breaks to provide small tutorials to explain how they are doing it, how others can emulate them and develop their own scripts and comic-strip based ways of making data accessible to even the most data-agnostic audience.

At the end of the comic strip is an actual in-depth, yet simple, tutorial of how a data-comic story using simple Microsoft excel functions … and even with guidelines on how to generate comic strips without the ability to draw using online libraries.

It is an excellent effort that should be useful to anyone who wants to tell an engaging story with data in an insightful manner. And perhaps it willl also make the ardent ‘numbers don’t give the whole picture’ addict see that they do precisely that and more.

Do I have a complaint or two? Minor ones, but yes I do. Else how will one know that I have done a serious review?

There is a page where Time Series charts are explained, quite efficiently, but the narrative is broken ever so slightly because the premise of cricket is abandoned for that one page and the authors take recourse to sales growth and strategy. While sales growth and strategy could have been mentioned as one of the uses of time series charts, there are plenty of intricate cricketing insights that can also be derived from such charts. Perhaps one could have used such an example.

And since this is a book on data, I would perhaps have been even more delighted if Duckworth-Lewis had not been dismissed as ‘one of the unfathomable mysteries that mankind is struggling to come to terms with’. I know it was a remark made in jest, but to me it was a missed opportunity to demonstrate with graphs and pictures why a problem involving three variables (runs, overs, wickets) is far more difficult to understand than something with just two (run-rate). The exponential decay function used by Duckworth-Lewis method could have been excellently captured in a picture, and also perhaps demystified to an extent.

But that will perhaps be done in another book by the authors. This one is indeed a brilliant one and I do hope there are a few others in the offing which takes us deeper into the subject.

From Data to Stories by Richie Lionell V and Ramya Mylavarapu
Wiley
ISBN: 9789354249891
112 pages
INR 499