The Numbers Game

Fantasy Bob has been following the controversy over the Government's testing target with mild interest.  What exactly was the 100,000 target in the first place?  Does a test in the post count as a test given?  Can the same test be counted twice?  Are retests tests?  Is Hancock a hero or a dissembler?  (And how did Tony Hancock come to be involved in all this anyway?) Will all this self-congratulation and posturing make any difference to the number of people dying in the UK?

Sir - are you available tomorrow?

It is troubling.  FB acknowledges that 100,000 is a big number.  However, at this time of year he would have expected to have been fixated on what might appear a smaller number but it is in reality a hugely bigger number.

FB's cricket club, go-ahead Edinburgh outfit Carlton, is, to the best of FB's knowledge, the only cricket club in Scotland, and possibly the UK, to field 5 senior teams on a Saturday.

For reasons that escape him, it falls to FB to populate these teams week in, week out.  He is therefore in a unique position in world cricket, as the only person having to find 55 living, breathing cricketers every week.  Some weeks during the season 55 seems to him a considerably bigger number than 100,000.

And, in the light of the current controversy, readers should be clear that cricketers in the post cannot count towards this total. Nor can cricketers being delivered by Amazon.  Cricketers recricketed cannot be counted. Only cricketers who turn up to the appointed ground at the appointed hour.

But make no mistake, in pursuing this target while he cannot change what counts as a cricket team, FB is as ruthless as Hancock, Tony or any other of that tribe.  The aged and infirm are dragged from their sick beds; the young grasped from their mothers' breast. Queues at IKEA are stripped. There is no discrimation on gender, religion or a person's views on the symphonies of Mahler.  If FB has only 54 players on the slate, and you come into his viewfinder, you had better have a good excuse.  Telling him you will be delivered next day sometime between 12 and 3 by Amazon is not good enough.

It cannot be said that FB regards his task with unalloyed joy at all times.  Friday nights have been locked down for him well before it has come the current fashion. There have been weeks when the unavailable column goes off the edge of FB's spreadsheet as players quite unreasonably decide to take holidays, or study for exams, or go to far-flung music festivals or consider that their broken ankle is a valid excuse, or say that they will be delivered by Amazon.  See how Hancock would cope with this.

And yet, what FB would not give to have been subject to these vexations again this week rather than sitting locked-down, cricketless and assailed by fractious squabbles over statistic machinations.