The commentator’s curse is now in mathematical form and Pakistan fans won’t be too happy to learn that a former player in the commentary box is seemingly detrimental to the team’s batting.
Twitter user Waqas Ahmed employed ‘conservative sequential sampling’ to derive that Ramiz Raja’s presence in the commentary box means that Pakistan lose a couple of wickets even before they begin their batting.
The inspiration for Waqas to jump into the mathematical model came from a tweet that mentioned how Pakistan fans often thought that they lost wickets when Ramiz Raja was in the commentary box. “Let’s track every time Pakistan loses wickets when Rambo [Ramiz Raja] is on air,” the tweet said.
People have discussed this on Twitter for years and yet no ones gotten around to it and we have lost years of data. But basically let’s track everytime Pakistan loses wickets when Rambo is on air. Someone diligent needs to do this. Pls.
— Ahmer Naqvi (@karachikhatmal) January 27, 2021
Well.. i just watched all of Pakistan’s wickets and I kid you not, Ramiz was the commentator on every single one. LITERALLY. EVERY. SINGLE. ONE.
All 8!
— Jibby (@JibbyD) January 27, 2021
Waqas tried to use sampling data in the absence of actual data to arrive at a conclusion. He took five random matches between 2015 and 2021 to check how Pakistan do with the bat with Ramiz Raja on air. The results were startling as he derived that “Pakistan would lose 2 wickets without even taking the field” if Ramiz was on air.
This means that if no balls were bowled the mere presence of Ramiz in the combox basically meant that Pakistan would lose 2 wickets without even taking the field.
Furthermore, the math behind this takes into account 2 hours per session and was sampled using the following games~
— Waqas Ahmed (@ahmedwaqas992) January 28, 2021
6 spells every day which roughly constitutes 18 overs per innings and hence 90 overs in total across the 5 games. So 90 overs & 28 scalps gives us 19.28 SR which when put through a linear model basically provides a negative 2.202 average for our team (based on other bowlers #s)
— Waqas Ahmed (@ahmedwaqas992) January 28, 2021
“If he does 30 mins commentary per session and if we take five minutes per over in that time frame, Ramiz basically commentates for 18 overs per day (if he’s in the commentary panel and if Pakistan are batting),” Waqas told Wisden.com.
“During this time he’s invoked 28 dismissals across 5 innings (50 wickets) so that gives him a strike-rate of 19.28, conservatively speaking. I then took all bowlers who had performed against Pakistan in the last 5 years and charted their SR and AVG as an XY scatter plot to develop a statistical trend line.
“Then I plugged the 19.28 SR of Ramiz into it and it basically translated to a negative 2.02 average per wicket which basically means that Rambo [Ramiz Raja] is invoking wickets by his mere presence.”
The strike-rate (if he were seen as a bowler) is better than what the average bowler has against Pakistan in the last five years, funnily making him one of their biggest threats when batting.
