Obituary: An OH for the icons of Cricket
If one is to go by Artificial Intelligence - today's buzword, the greatest cricketer of even the recent past will be dumped for ever. May be some of the all time greats, hitherto, find a bit more or a byte few, on the server where Sachin Tendulkar is still getting the clicks!
We are living in the age of AI and at the same time we are
surviving Pakistan. When mullah mansoor got the controvercial shot, we realized
how our DATA base got compromised. Well is it a strength or a weakness? We know
our big data is held by Mark Zukerberg , the neo imperialist who is unwittingly
threatening all but US elections .
The concept of Artificial Intelligence is relatively lesser
known in Pakistan except professional. The main reason of course is that our public
offices have refused to grow with time and the concept of e governance remains
nothing but an utter failure.
No one would better be placed to have understanding of the manipulation
of data than a cricket statistician. When Indian Cricket team visited Pakistan
in 1978-79, the matches were merely a statistician’s galore. The following
season, when Pakistan visited India the results reversed. Pakistan’s ace bowler
Imran Khan and the star batsman Zaheer Abbas struggled with their fitness on the
field.
Analysts of the game of cricket seldom draw comparisons of
two players from different eras. Yet there have been scores of books written on
the subject and these books drew the attention of the sports lovers too.
How can I declare Don
Bradman (Commonly known as the great Sir DON) the greatest ever batsman when he
scored all his runs against spinners and in the age, less competitive as it had been in the recent
past. The only time Don Bradman faced a speedster (Larwood), he had to eat a humble pie by his own standards.
Why Tendulker became darling of the world cricket is not by
virtue of his skills but for his privilege to have lived in the times of Fans
pages. Even if he would not click on the field, he got the clicks.
Shall we name artificial intelligence an average intelligence?
May be so because when Shahid Afridi hit lofty drives, he get runs, he get
applause how much technically wrong he may have been!
And when Misbah score a ton, technically sound on the field
yet he continues to irritate spectators who want to see runs being scored at
accelerated rates.
May be we need that, let the technique go awry and the big
data continue to remain numeric after all we are here to enjoy the game.
