What an Empty File Taught Me: The Difference Between 'Data Exists' and 'Data Was Read' in Cricket Reporting

Last week, in my room in Bangalore, I opened a document titled — Cricket, Asia. Everything under that title was blank. No player, no scorecard, no date, no quote. Just a label that someone had typed in advance. And on the strength of that label I was asked to write a 'deep analysis' of it.

I am sixty-eight years old and I have spent a large part of my life keeping records that nobody wants to read. On Monday afternoon a Karnataka coach called me to say that a 'technical report' on one of his batsmen was ready and I should look at it. When I opened the file it contained the player's name, and nothing else. I asked where the rest was. The answer: 'It has been put into the system, now you look at it.' That is the same disease that has spread through every branch of cricket reporting today — whether it is a selection committee, a DRS review, or a pre-auction list in the Indian Premier League.

I am writing this because we do not lack data today. We lack the habit of reading it. Opening a file and reading a file are worlds apart — and that gap is what decides whether a selection was right or wrong, whether a dismissal was correct or not.

I remember 2026. The Deccan Herald sent me to the Ranji Trophy final at the M. Chinnaswamy Stadium, and on the second day I watched the umpire, not the batsman. A low, dying catch came to short leg. Touching the grass, the fingers still closing. The umpire gave it not out. Karnataka's fielders stood their ground, and nobody in the press box could name the clause that governs that moment. I went home, read the 2026 Code end to end, and found that its language was useless — meaning the situation simply had no clean answer in it.

That day I started my card index. A shoebox, a card for every Law clause, filed by situation rather than by number. Whether a batsman was out or not, whether the ball touches grass, when a catch is 'complete'. The system made sense to me and to no editor. It cost me three routine match reports in a month, but it made me the only reporter in Bangalore who could settle an obstruction argument without leaving his chair.

That may sound like self-praise, but my point is different. I want to describe how a condition like that empty file comes into being. No database is empty by accident; no system breaks without cause. A label is inserted — 'Cricket, Asia' — and everyone assumes the work is done. Whoever placed the label never asked whether the content underneath had arrived.

This shows up everywhere in cricket. I remember the early IPL era of 2026, when franchises spent crores on 'data-driven scouting' of players. On paper every player had a profile, a ball-by-ball record, a strike rate against left-arm spin. And yet on auction night the same thing happened that always happens — nobody opened the laptop, nobody read the report, and the bidding was done on 'intuition'. There is a saying about me: when everyone was chasing the money, I stayed with the footnotes. The footnote is the place that records which match the number came from, on what pitch, against which bowler — and whether anyone actually read it.

The rain night in Sydney I will always remember. March 2026, World Cup semi-final. The Hindu sent me to the SCG. Ten minutes of rain turned a chase of 22 off 13 balls into 22 off one. Forty thousand people were booing, and I was on the back of three scorecards with a pocket calculator, rebuilding the 'most productive overs' calculation. At two in the morning I filed two thousand words — a clause-by-clause post-mortem of a rule drafted for a different format. The sports editor buried it on page nineteen.

That night one thing became certain to me: the outcome of a game is decided by clauses, not by highlights — and the man who does not read the clauses always lags behind in the noise of the crowd. From 2026 I decided I would read a tournament's regulations before its first ball. Because of that habit I was often the only man in the press box who knew the reserve day had already been burned.

But here I must ask myself a question. Is reading the rules enough? No. The greatest danger of my career was always this — that the clause becomes the story and the human being buried underneath disappears. Behind that short-leg catch there was a fielder who had watched the ball touch the grass with his own eyes and for whom that was a career-defining moment. Behind that Sydney night there was a captain in the dressing room who was told in four minutes that his match was over. The document is my method; the consequence is my story. If I invert those two, I become the reporter who prints a photograph of the scorecard and forgets the player's name.

And there is another trap I have always feared — reflexive contrarianism. Saying 'actually, the opposite happened' is easy, and it has been right often enough that it becomes a formula. Around 2026 there is a settled story here — Kapil Dev's team produced a miracle. I did not play that tournament, but I have read its records, and the truth is that a large part of that win lies in the format and the playing conditions in force at the time. Saying 'there was no miracle' would be foolish; saying 'it was only a miracle' is just as foolish. I do not overturn a story because overturning is my habit — I overturn it only when the primary source proves it, and I state plainly what evidence would change my mind.

The third trap is the cleverest — insider drift. I have spent fifty years in board offices, outside meeting rooms, entering through the second door. When you drink tea for twenty years with the man who chairs the selection committee, his arguments start to feel like your own. I have to admit this is my greatest professional risk. There is only one cure: publish the thing that wants to stay in the minutes of the board meeting — and audit your own access.

Now back to that empty file. The one field that was filled had not been written by a model that read anything; it had been inserted in advance by someone sitting at a stage along the way. This happens with cricket every day. We are told that 'bulk data' on thirty players has arrived, and when you open every one of them you find 403 written on all of them — the door is shut, there is nothing inside. Data existing is one thing, data being reachable is another, and data being read is a third. Any good cricket report merges all three, and so does any good system.

One thing I must say clearly, because it is part of my friendship as well as my profession. If I have nothing more than that empty file, I can write four thousand words, but not one of them will be true. I am a reporter, not an astrologer. When the coach sent me that half-file I said: 'Brother, there is a player's name and nothing else. This is not a report, it is the name of a folder.' In the same way, if a match report reaches me with only 'Cricket, Asia' written on it, my job is to go back and ask — where is the original scorecard, who wrote the score, which frame was paused, and which law applied to that frame.

Three Scorecards, One Clause, and No Room for Guesswork

I think the greatest need in cricket reporting right now is that we publicly explain the difference between 'the information has arrived' and 'the information has been understood'. If a franchise says its scouting system is modern, the question is not whether the system exists. The question is which player was last selected through that system, in which match he played, and whether his performance matched the report. Only by asking that will we learn whether there is anything under the label or only empty space.

In the same way, if someone says DRS has ended the controversies, we must look at which DRS appeals clearly fell within 'conclusive evidence' and which did not. I built a spreadsheet of four hundred rows recording every ICC playing-condition change since 2026. In many places that sheet says the rule changed, but not where in which match the change landed. That same gap exists in our reporting.

And that is where my forward thought begins: in the coming decade the most valuable thing in cricket will not be data — it will be provenance. Knowing where a number came from, who recorded it, when it was updated, and who read it. The franchise, the board, the broadcaster that knows this will make the right decisions. Everyone else will keep hunting for labels inside their own empty folders.