14/06/2025
MIMCC 143/8 (40 overs)
Connah’s Quay 2s 145/2 (31 overs)
Connah’s Quay win by 8 wickets
Scorecard here: https://nwcl.play-cricket.com/website/results/6817634
A tough day for MIMCC as we fell to our first defeat of the season, 14-1 at the hands of CQCC. After water damage to the pitch overnight, the game was essentially decided on the toss of the coin. And, as we all know, tosses are not my forte.
This got me thinking. Given my reputation anecdotally as a useless tosser; how well earned is this reputation in reality? And how mathematically unlikely is my record?
Digging back through the data on playcricket, I have won a total of 15 out of 42 tosses over the past three years.
In absolute terms, the probability of this result is 1.1% or 91-1 against
Similarly probable events include a goalkeeper scoring a goal in a football match, winning a 5 set tennis match from 2 sets down, or experiencing an earthquake >5 on the Richter scale on any given day in California.
Looking at it in terms of deviation from the expected result (50% of tosses called correctly) – the result is 1.85 standard deviations below the mean. If you were to then plot this deviation onto a range of outcomes with a similar normal distribution, the results make interesting reading. For example, if plotted onto the bell curve for intelligence, 1.85 standard deviations below the mean would place my level somewhere around that of a 4-year-old (or a particularly smart chimpanzee or bonobo). Which seems apt.
Thanks to my co-author Professor Chatwyn Greville Patterson-Thomas of the Institute of Advanced Tossing.