The Empty Spreadsheet, The Full Ground: The Column Indian Cricket Never Built

December 2026, Feroz Shah Kotla. The ground at eight in the morning does not look the way television builds it. What the camera calls haze is actually something sitting there — three hundred feet above the stands, colourless, unmoving, as if someone printed the sky in the wrong ink. The third Test between India and Sri Lanka was being played in that air, and the players were wearing masks.

Around noon, Sri Lanka's fast bowler Suranga Lakmal walked off the field, vomiting. He did not retire hurt, he was not injured, there was no column for him under any rule. The scorecard simply kept a blank white space where he had been.

In the same press box, a laptop was open on the seat beside mine. On the screen was a dashboard — ball-by-ball logs, pitch maps, wagon wheels, expected runs, bowling workload. After the first session, a line appeared that I have never been able to forget. In English it said: insufficient information.

I did not understand, in that moment, what was insufficient. Not the match — the match was happening in front of me, a ball was being bowled, a batsman was batting, a man was walking off to be sick. What was insufficient was the system that was measuring it. It had no column for the air.

The first voice note I sent from the Kotla was mostly me breathing. Of sixty seconds, perhaps fifteen were my voice; the rest was that same air, a horn somewhere far away, and the echo of empty stands. That day I resigned from a print desk of twenty-two years, and nobody asked me why, because the people who might have asked were breathing the same air.

Deadline taught me to write fast; the voice note taught me to write true. And the truth that day was that the thing that mattered was in no spreadsheet.

---

What that man's name was

I need to be clear before I go further: I am not against data. I am against the room in which data is trusted more than the ground.

In the 1980s, when I sat on the sports desk of The Times of India, cricket data arrived in an annual book. It carried Ranji Trophy averages, domestic scorecards, and a whole page of names nobody knew. That data was slow and incomplete, but it was honest in one respect — it knew it was incomplete. No book ever claimed to have measured all of Indian cricket.

Today's dashboard makes that claim. It draws a whole match on screen — the length of every ball, the direction of every shot, the speed of every over, the fatigue of every bowler. And when it knows nothing, it fills a box with the same confidence, writing only that the information is unavailable. That is not humility. That is an empty cell taking somebody else's place.

I see four different stories inside that empty cell, and the real argument in Indian cricket is about telling the four apart.

The first is when the event never happened. No wicket fell, no run was scored, no decision was made. This is the cleanest zero, and nobody fears it.

The second is when the event happened but nobody logged it. A Ranji Trophy quarter-final played in a small town, no camera, no ball-by-ball logger, and by next morning the match is a scorecard in a database — eleven names, a few numbers, nothing else. In that match a fast bowler had taken three wickets with reverse swing on the fourth afternoon. Nobody knows. The system will say: insufficient information.

The third is the most interesting. The event was recorded, but the template had no column for it. Kotla's air was like that. Lakmal's body was like that. There was nowhere on any form to record that breathing was a technical skill in this match.

The fourth is the most expensive. The event was recorded, the column existed, but the man who should have looked did not look. This zero is not technical, it is human. And most of Indian cricket's selection controversies are built from this fourth story.

---

Where the camera does not go

The Ranji Trophy has been played since 2026. It is the oldest domestic structure in Indian cricket, and it is where every Test cricketer came from. Wasim Jaffer holds the record for the most runs in its history — a record built not in an IPL season but in stadiums where the most reliable thing in the press box was often the tea.

Now place that tournament inside a data system built for televised cricket. Televised matches generate ball-by-ball data, because there is a camera, a commentator, a scorer, a company selling the data. Matches that are not broadcast do not generate it. That does not mean cricket did not happen there. It means nobody was buying it.

Indian cricket's data problem is not a modelling problem, it is a coverage problem. We built an instrument that watches twenty per cent of the country's grounds and then speaks about the other eighty per cent on the strength of that twenty.

Where does this show? In the auction.

January 2026, Bengaluru. The IPL mega auction. 578 players shortlisted, 169 sold, eight franchises with purses of eighty crore each. I was sitting there with Rajasthan Royals' analysts, listening to a bid of twelve crore fifty lakh for Ben Stokes.

I learned the transfer window from a room full of men raising numbered paddles. But in that room I also saw that every paddle lifted somebody — somebody's son, somebody's village, somebody's coach who had seen him in a net ten years earlier and said there was something there.

This is where the third story returns. There were 578 names in that room, and beside many of them was written exactly what was written on the Kotla screen — insufficient information. A twenty-four-year-old fast bowler with sixty wickets across two Ranji seasons had no highlight reel because his matches were never broadcast. So who priced him? A scout's WhatsApp message. A former coach's recommendation. The memory of a franchise's local representative.

This is where the absence of data converts directly into money. A player without data is not worth what he should be worth. He is worth the mood of the room.

---

The richest room, the least recorded decision

The auction room is the most information-rich room in Indian cricket. Every player's name, age, domestic average, injury history, previous season's strike rate is on screen. And yet many of the biggest decisions taken in that room have no written basis at all.

I once heard a franchise owner say he wanted a player who could "sit in the dressing room". I asked where that data was available. He laughed and said that was exactly the problem.

This is not a joke. It is the largest unanswered question in the whole analytics debate. We measured the speed of the ball, the angle of the bat, the sprint of the fielder. We did not measure who is first to stand up and say something when a team is 90 for five on the fourth day and nobody in the dressing room is speaking.

I asked an analyst in that room whether he had a metric for it. He said no, and probably never would.

So what was data doing in that room? It was doing what it does well — catching lies. When an agent claimed his player had been the most economical quick of the previous season, the analyst showed that seventy per cent of his overs had come on a ground with a short boundary and a slow pitch. Data broke the claim. That is data's most honest use — refutation, not construction.

But the franchise bought the player anyway, because the coach liked his ball. And the player was injured the following season. Now tell me — whose data was right?

---

The variable whose real name was the crowd

September to November 2026. The entire IPL season in the UAE, across three grounds, with no spectators. Cut-outs in the stands, artificial applause from speakers, and a strange silence in commentary that nobody named.

That season handed cricket analytics a gift it never understood the value of. Every model carries a variable called home advantage. It adds and subtracts a little for every team, every match, every season. In 2026 that variable went to zero for the whole season, because nobody's home ground was in that country.

And that is when it became clear that much of what we had been calling home advantage was actually crowd advantage. The variable was not the pitch, it was the twenty thousand people sitting behind the bowler's run-up, making noise when he takes a wicket, and creating a different kind of pressure when a batsman is out — pressure that appears in no scorebook.

That season I asked a former fast bowler what changes about bowling without a crowd. He said the three seconds after taking a wicket are the most important seconds for him. In those three seconds the noise tells him what he has done. Without noise, nothing happens in those three seconds, and he walks back to bowl the next ball as if nothing had happened at all.

This says a great deal about the screen that says information is insufficient. That screen was right. The most important information of that season — the pressure of the crowd, the echo of noise, the light that falls on a face for one moment — was in no column.

---

Fifty per cent that calls itself a hundred

Now to that screen's biggest error, which is not technical but linguistic.

Watch ball-tracking in DRS. The ball hits the pad, three spheres appear on the big screen, and the system says whether the ball is hitting the stumps. When the projection sits on a fifty-fifty margin, it becomes 'umpire's call' and the on-field decision stands.

But what the screen shows is not a probability. It shows a solid ball striking a solid stump. The spectator reads it as fact. The commentator says the ball was hitting the stumps. Nobody says the ball was probably hitting the stumps, and that 'probably' means we do not know.

This is the data desk's biggest lapse — it converts uncertainty into an image, and an image always speaks with confidence. A number that says 'fifty-one per cent' is honest. A three-dimensional picture of that same number saying 'that's hitting' is a lie, however clean the maths.

I have heard the argument many times about whether DRS has improved or damaged umpiring. I think the question is wrong. The question is whether we ever explained to the spectator that what he is watching is not a decision but an estimate. We did not. We gave him a picture that speaks with more confidence than it had any right to.

And this returns us to the screen that says 'insufficient information'. When the system says it does not have the information, it is telling the truth. When it fills an empty box with a number, it is lying. The problem is that we read both in the same font.

---

The body versus the screen

Every team now has a fast-bowling workload model. GPS patches, ball counts, sprint intensity, recovery time — together they produce a number that says this bowler needs a rest next match.

I once asked a fast bowler what happens when the screen says rest and his body says he is fine. He said the screen wins, because the screen has paper and the body only has a feeling.

That answer did not sit well with me, but I cannot say he was wrong. Because that same year another bowler said he was fine, played, and tore a hamstring in his third over. That day the screen was right.

So this is not data versus eye. This is about what data measures and what it leaves out. A workload model counts balls but does not count that the bowler's mother was in hospital that week, or that he had not slept for three nights, or that his contract expires next year and he needs one more match.

A model measures only what is in its template, and the template is built only from what has already been measured. That is a closed loop. Every truth outside the loop slowly becomes invisible, and then one day a report carries, in its place, the words: insufficient information.

---

The second eleven, the selector's notebook, and the man who makes the pitch

For a few years now I have kept a habit. In every series I pick one match nobody is watching — a Ranji Plate Group game, an under-19 trial, a club final — and I go and sit there. In those matches I find what big matches never give me: there is no data, so people watch with their eyes.

I once watched a selector write in a notebook with no printed columns. He told me he had kept such notebooks for twenty years, because what he needs is never on a form — how a batsman came back after being dismissed, or in what state a bowler sent down his last over.

I think Indian cricket's most valuable database is in that notebook, and it will never be digitised, because it has no format.

Likewise the man who makes the pitch. No model records how much water he put on it, on which day, and why. But the whole fourth day rests on that decision. When a commentator says the pitch has slowed, he does not name that man.

This is my biggest question about honesty. We have grown cricket's data so much that we believe we have understood cricket. In fact we have understood only the parts that were easy to measure. The rest is as invisible as it was in 2026 — except that now the invisibility comes with a dashboard that converts it into a technical term.

---

The argument happening in the wrong place

Now the angle that troubles me most.

For ten years Indian cricket has hosted an argument — data versus eye. Analytics versus experience. Spreadsheet versus instinct. It runs on every talk show, in every column, and it always ends in the same safe place: you need both. That is a conclusion with no risk in it, and nothing changes because of it.

The real blind spot in that argument is that both sides are watching the same matches. The data side is building datasets from televised cricket. The eye side is also watching televised cricket, because that is where the commentary work is. The argument between them is an argument inside televised cricket.

The real question sits in the match neither is watching — the Ranji quarter-final in Porbandar, the under-16 trial in Rohtak, the ground in Guwahati where the scorer is also the only other man present. Neither the data side nor the eye side reaches there. There is one man writing in a notebook and filing a report next morning that nobody reads.

So when someone says Indian cricket's data system has grown strong, I ask: which part? The part in front of the camera, yes. The part outside it — we are standing exactly where we stood in 2026, except now we have a better excuse.

I should also say clearly that I do not want to fall into romanticism. It is not true that Ranji cricket is dying. It is played every year, by more than twenty teams, and the quality of cricket there is not lower than any IPL league match. What is dying is the coverage. And the death of coverage is the death of data, and the death of data is the death of the career of a player nobody bought because no highlight reel was made.

---

That morning, again

I return to that Kotla morning, because for me it is not a date but a method.

That day I recorded forty-seven voice notes in seventy minutes. In none of them did I say who scored how many. I said how empty the stands were, that a man was coughing, that a horn was sounding somewhere far away and nobody stopped it, that a player on the field was wearing a mask and his eyes were saying something else.

That was data. It was simply not in a format any system could read. Reading it needed ears, and that day nobody in the press box had ears; everybody had a screen.

On that screen were the words: insufficient information.

And I think now that the screen was telling the complete truth that day — about itself, not about the match. It said: I have no column for that day. It did not say: nothing happened that day.

That is the difference we forget. An empty cell is a sentence. It says: something was here, and we did not look. We took it for a technical glitch and moved past it, and next morning another dashboard opened.

---

What comes next

When the next selector sits down with a printout, I have one question I want to see answered on that paper — is there a column for the thing that is not in the template?

If there is not, that printout is incomplete, however many numbers it carries. And if we keep assuming that what has been measured is the whole of cricket, we will slowly lose the players who are born outside that template — the slow ones who are wise, the ungainly ones who are immovable, the ones who played on a day when breathing was hard and bowled anyway.

That Kotla morning gave me something no dashboard ever gave — the certainty that the most important information is often in the room where no laptop is open. The microphone taught me to write true more than fast, and the cheapest test of honesty is whether you can recognise the empty cell in your own data and refuse to invent a number to fill it.

The space in the scorecard is still blank. Let it stay blank. It is the most honest line in Indian cricket.