Waiting for Three Letters: Cricket's Longest Night and Its Shortest Message

At three in the morning, every light in the stadium had gone out, but one screen was still glowing — and on that screen were just three letters: 'N/A'. In a database, this is merely an empty field. But if you have ever spent a night on a Mumbai digital desk, you know that 'N/A' is never empty. It is a place where a match's story was supposed to arrive and did not. Where a reporter took on the responsibility of writing 250 words and an agency feed turned it into an empty string. I have seen these empty strings many times — sometimes in a server error, sometimes in an editor's haste, and sometimes in that old habit of believing tactics are 'for the boys'.

Think about it: an entire cricket match — 40 overs, 300 deliveries, two innings, eleven players each, thousands of spectators — and its entire digital record collapses into a structure where the title is 'N/A', the summary is blank, and the list of information points looks like sand on a rain-soaked pitch: visible, but impossible to hold.

This is not merely a technical glitch. It is the face of the entire system we call 'cricket coverage' and what is actually 'cricket data management'.

Cricket data is never neutral — it always belongs to someone. And when it belongs to no one, it disappears. This article is an audit of that disappearance.

The tradition of data in cricket is as old as the scorebook. When the first known cricket scorecard was recorded in 1776, no one knew that two centuries later this same data would underpin a franchise's auction strategy. Today, in an IPL auction, a player's price is determined by his strike rate, economy, and 'impact' numbers over the last three seasons — and those same numbers make his 47 runs in a Ranji Trophy match 'irrelevant' in someone's eyes.

Over the past few years, I have watched cricket's data system split into three distinct layers. The first layer — the broadcaster's data: fast, glossy, but limited only to the match they have paid for. The second layer — the board's data: protected, selective, and often public only in the form the board wishes to show. The third layer — the independent journalist's data: slow, incomplete, but often the truest. And it is this third layer that automated systems like Stage-1 turn into 'N/A'.

I have a private notebook — I call it my 'pitch notebook'. In it are the things that never made it to the agency feed: the Tamil tune rising from the northern stand at Chepauk, the smell of earth after rain at Eden Gardens, and the moment a bowler, after being hit for a boundary, asked for the ball back — simply because he wanted to place it in the right spot. These are all 'information points', but they have no place in any database. When a system cannot record them, it writes 'N/A' — and we assume nothing happened.

This is the greatest crisis in cricket coverage: our memory is now limited to what some system was able to record.

In 2026, when I started working at a Mumbai digital desk, I was told that a match report was 250 words — no more, no less. Whatever the agency sent would be printed. Tactics? Those were 'for the boys'. At the time, I did not understand that this was not just an editorial policy but the beginning of a much larger data erasure. When you compress a match into 250 words, you inevitably turn 80 percent of that match into 'N/A'.

But here is something I have found to be most true in my 21-year career: data that disappears leaves its place behind.

We call that place 'silence'. And silence, too, is evidence.

If you look at the scorebook of a Ranji match in which a young batsman scored 92, and then search newspaper archives for that batsman, you will find no mention of that 92. But if you meet that player — as I did at a regional ground in Uttar Pradesh — he will tell you that the pitch's behaviour that day mattered more than the 92 runs. 'By the third day the pitch had started to slow down,' he told me, 'and I noticed the spinner was getting the ball to bounce a little more. I changed my stance, but no one saw.'

No one saw. This sentence hides behind every 'N/A' in cricket coverage.

Let us return to the technical report that was placed before me under the name 'Stage-1'. It recorded only one thing: 'cricket_world'. Meaning this is something related to cricket. That is all. No title, no summary, no information points. Seeing it gave me the same feeling a commentator gets when an entire over disappears from the ball-by-ball feed — the scoreboard shows 12 overs, but you cannot recall a single delivery from the 7th. You know something happened, but no proof of it remains.

This is cricket data's greatest irony: we have the most detailed sports statistics in the world, and yet our collective memory is far smaller than those numbers.

An incident from my career comes to mind. One night in 2026, in a Mumbai newsroom, I was commentating on a UEFA Champions League semi-final — Real Madrid versus Atletico Madrid. There was no studio feed, only radio audio and a fan-periscope stream. I counted 47,000 fans who sang until the final whistle. My editor asked for a 300-word report; I wrote 900 words about the stadium's farewell. Not a single information point in that report was 'N/A' — because I recorded what no database records: the sound, the echo, and a stadium's goodbye.

But this is not just about sentiment. The real consequences of data erasure in cricket are very concrete.

Take Lokesh Rahul's example. Early in his Test career, there came a long phase when his statistics did not tell the story of how he was playing. His average was falling, but his defensive technique was visibly improving — something no scorecard shows. In a database, his 'form' was a falling graph, but to the coach working with him, he was a player learning something new in every innings. We have no field for this learning process. So it becomes 'N/A'.

And this is where I want to turn my argument slightly.

The common assumption is that data erasure is a technical problem — servers, feeds, scraping, JS rendering. And of course, these things are real. But in my experience, the biggest erasure is never technical. It is electoral. Someone chooses what gets recorded and what does not. Someone chooses what gets printed in 250 words. Someone chooses whose name appears on the auction list and whose does not. 'N/A' is never nature's decision — it is always a human decision, even if that human is sitting inside an algorithm.

In the 2026 World Cup, I followed Morocco's fans — three brothers from Casablanca who saved for 18 months and spent €4,200 each to travel 6,000 kilometres. I ran their story alongside Neymar's €222 million transfer fee. The editor wanted the fee first. I put the pilgrimage first. That piece was shared 12,000 times in North Africa. It was proof that readers want the data that connects to their lives, not just what makes headlines.

So if Stage-1 being empty is a technical failure, its solution is also technical — check the feed, wait for rendering, fix the parsing template. But if it is part of that larger habit in which we compress cricket's stories into 250 words and three letters, then the solution is much harder. For that, we must accept that a match's real data is never only in the scorecard.

Every match has a moment that is recorded in no database — and that is the moment most remembered.

Another page from my pitch notebook comes to mind. In a domestic match at Chepauk, a young spinner bowled his first over in which no wicket fell, there was no maiden, no dot ball. In the scorecard, that over is recorded simply as eight runs. But after that over, a voice rose from the stand — an old man's voice, in Tamil, saying just one word: 'Azhagu' (beautiful). That one word changed the direction of that bowler's entire career — he later told me that after that day he began working on making his bowling 'beautiful'. Today he is a well-known name in domestic cricket.

That voice has no field. There is no 'crowd-sound index'. There is no 'Tamil commentary resonance score'. But it existed, and it changed a career.

This is why I begin every article with a single sound or a single scene — never with a technical note. Because I know that if I begin with tactics, I will not reach the people who most need to understand cricket's most important things. And if I begin with a sound, even those who already know everything will listen.

Now back to that empty screen.

There are three lessons from this whole episode that are not limited to cricket.

First — 'N/A' is a data point, not its absence. When a player's record is 'not available', that in itself is information — perhaps the record did not exist, perhaps there was no way to record it, perhaps it was deliberately not recorded. All three situations tell different stories.

Second — the quality of coverage should be measured by its emptiest field, not its fullest. Any broadcaster can show you a strike rate. The real question is what they did not show. For me, the true measure of a report's credibility is how much space it gives to 'don't know' — and how much courage it has to write 'don't know'.

Third — automation is never neutral. A system that tries to understand an entire story from a tag like 'cricket_world' will inevitably miss the stories that do not fit into a tag. And cricket's best stories are always outside the tags we want to put them in.

I began this article with that screen on which three letters were glowing. I will not end it with the same question I began with.

Instead, I am opening the first page of a new pitch notebook.

On that page is today's date, and beneath it just one sentence: 'Today I watched a match that has no data — and it was the best match ever.'

Because if all of cricket's stories get recorded in databases, what will be left for the commentator to do? Our real job is to record what is 'N/A'. The sound of the ball that does not appear in the scorecard. The breath of the crowd that does not show in any over-graph. And the silence that is the most important moment of a player's career.

The next time you read a cricket report and something looks empty, do not skip it. Ask — what was there? Who removed it? And can it be brought back?

Because cricket's memory is not only of the numbers we have. It is also of the questions we dared to ask — and the empty spaces where a story should have been.