In cricket we must distinguish between what counts and what does not

Cricket is a numbers game. One of the great joys is to know the records and to revel in the obscure statistics the game throws up. But, like any other pleasure, we need to be careful not to indulge ourselves. We have to distinguish between numbers that count and numbers that don’t. This week the acting captain of South Africa, Wiaan Mulder, declined to break a record that was his for the taking and he made the right decision not to do so, even if it was for the wrong reason.

Sport these days has begun to drown in data. Peter Drury cannot get through five minutes of a Premier League game before informing us all that this is only the second time a man called Kevin has scored in the 32nd minute on a Tuesday in March.

Andrew Castle has spent the week at Wimbledon reading out inconsequential facts and figures about the angle of the second serve at the French Open. There is a weird impressiveness to the fact anyone should have unearthed any of these facts, but none of them matter and none of it is as lyrical as Dan Maskell celebrating a player hitting the ball “over the high part of the net”.

I am not making the grumpy old-school point that the players should simply get on with it, uninterrupted by all these laptop-wielding maths graduates. Collecting, analysing and comprehending the data is a way of drawing the pattern of the game. The more we understand, the more we are liable to improve.But there are still limits to the spread of data through sport. Some sports clearly lend themselves to the use of data better than others. Football is a dynamic game that is as much about blend as it is about individual brilliance, and the melding together of a team is hard to capture.

It is odd, as Ben Jones and Nathan Leamon point out in Hitting Against The Spin: How Cricket Really Works, that football should have become a game more awash with statistics than any other. The numbers game is cricket.However, we need to be discriminating. During this England-India Test series we have been regaled with all manner of new records. India scored more than 1,000 runs at Edgbaston, though all that really told us was the pitch was flat and the ball was soft.

Shubman Gill beat Virat Kohli’s record of the most runs by an Indian captain in a single innings. With 585 runs in two Tests he could beat Bradman’s tally of 810 during the 1936/37 Ashes. On Thursday, Joe Root became the first player to score 3,000 Test runs against India. It’s a fine achievement, of course, but all it tells you really is that Root has played against India more often than some of the equally superb players who preceded him.There are, though, records with a sort of sanctity to them. The great records of the game are Jim Laker’s 19 wickets at Old Trafford in 1956, Don Bradman’s unsurpassable batting average of 99.94, Brian Lara’s highest ever Test score of 400 not out.

On 7 July, Mulder, standing in as the captain of South Africa, declared the innings when he was himself 367 not out, 33 short of Brian Lara’s all-time record. After the game, Mulder said he did not regret the declaration and that Lara holding the record was just as it should be, although Lara himself seems to disagree. Mulder was right to declare the innings and leave the record intact – but not for the sentimental reason he gave.

At Antigua in April 2004, Lara repelled the attack that a year later would win England the Ashes – Matthew Hoggard, Steve Harmison, Andrew Flintoff and Simon Jones. Mulder scored his runs against a sub-standard Zimbabwe bowling attack. That’s why the record should stand; not because Lara was a genius and Mulder isn’t, but because Lara’s innings mattered and Mulder’s didn’t.