The inaccurate, deceitful statement of the number of fifties scored by Test batsmen
When a batsman in a Test match reaches 50, you will be told as a matter of incontrovertible fact how many Test half-centuries he has now accumulated. "That is Big Bertie Crumphammer's 17th Test fifty," a commentator will dutifully announce, when Crumphammer reaches fifty for the 98th time in his career, his 81 dazzling centuries cast into temporary statistical oblivion for no discernible reason.
This has to stop. Did Mohammad Azharuddin, whilst scoring centuries in his first three Tests against England in 1984-85, also score his first-ever Test fifty on three separate occasions? Did the young Everton Weekes, having converted his first five 50-plus scores into centuries in a consecutive innings, run himself for 90 in Madras in January 1949 in order to get his maiden half-century under his belt, to quell the social media grumblings that he had played eight Tests without making a fifty? Imagine Narsingh Deonarine and the late George Headley batting together for West Indies in a hypothetical Test next week in which each team is allowed one player from the dead to play via a special Hawksoul Ouija machine. Both players reach fifty. Both will be credited with their "sixth" Test half-century. Are they thus peas from a statistical pod, the legendary Headley with his ten centuries in 22 Tests, whilst Deonarine has failed to trouble the honours board engravers in 18 matches? Or is Deonarine in fact a superior player because his five previous "fifties" were scored in fewer matches? Don Bradman made only 13 half-centuries in 52 Tests. Can he possibly have been all he was cracked up to be?
The world would be a better place if we were told the number of times a batsman has reached fifty, not the number of times he has reached fifty without subsequently reaching 100 (which, in isolation and without context, is a statistic of considerable irrelevance, even within the innately irrelevant field of sporting statistics). Not a better place by a discernible amount, but a better place nonetheless.