I was fielding at square leg when the ball flew high over my head, struck from the western end of the pitch at St Andrew’s College in a hurried arc. It took about four seconds to reach my father.

All of 71, he was sitting on a bench talking with my daughter, their eyes averted from the game, and I had already started sprinting towards them, yelling at the same moment the leather projectile zeroed in on him, gashing open his head and sending him sprawling to the ground.

Only later in casualty, as a medic looped seven stitches in his bloodied forehead, did the catastrophising kick in. What if the ball had struck him in the temple? Or hit my child?

Having set up the match myself, I felt a sick pit of culpability in my stomach, like John Irving’s titular hero Owen Meany. The consequences didn’t bear thinking about.

We assume death and serious injury in cricket is freakish and far apart. But that incident seven years ago had me reconsidering, and recent studies have found evidence of a larger, more serious problem than our schoolboy view of the game had previously allowed.

Now, a new book that examines and explains cricket history using different data sources has drawn some unsettling conclusions, raising concerns of the probable significant under-reporting of concussion incidents here in Australia, and that this occurs at a higher rate than elsewhere in the world.

A wide-ranging book, Crickonomics by Stefan Szymanski (pictured above) and Tim Wigmore, answers numerous tantalising questions about Australia’s premier summer sport. If you have wondered whether batters or bowlers are more valuable, why the private school system continues to feed the upper echelons of the game or how women’s cricket has innovated the sport, you are in luck.

But it is the book’s estimate of concussion rates in Australia that makes for the most fascinating reading.

Szymanski, an economics professor at the University of Michigan’s School of Kinesiology, has written a number of books on sport using statistical analysis, including three on soccer.

But the Nigerian-born, UK-raised son of a Polish dad and English mum is just as hooked on cricket and has a netted pitch and ball machine in his backyard (his son Ed, he tells me, is the owner of the fittingly titled Lords restaurant in New York).

“I think there’s always been a resistance to the idea that data can tell us anything,” Szymanski says of Crickonomics, over an early morning (for me) Zoom call. “And there’s a belief that there’s something in the game, which you’re missing out on if you try to put it into numbers, and there’s a spirit of the game and a soul of the game.”

But keeping better data, both writers contend, is where cricket can save lives and prevent injuries.

“The experience of Australia suggests that concussions have been systematically underreported,” Szymanski and Wigmore say.

A cricket ball weighs 163 grams and, with a cork core wrapped in string and sealed with leather, is one of the hardest balls in sport.

Nobody wants to be hit by a cricket ball. A batter, even with the advantage of pads, gloves and a box, still does whatever they can to not be hit by that ball, which has a deep impact regardless of pace – and at true pace can be terrifying.

The death of Phillip Hughes in 2014 from a bouncer that tore the artery below his left ear was one of the few well-publicised incidents to bring the dangers of cricket balls sharply into focus. Before this in Australia, you had to go back to 1975 and the death of 22-year-old Martin Bedkober, a talented Adam Gilchrist-esque keeper/batsman on the verge of state selection, who died after being hit “over the heart” by a ball.

In the decade up to 2014, one concussion a season was reported in Australian cricket. After Hughes’ death, Cricket Australia commissioned La Trobe University to research concussions. It found evidence of 92 head impacts in men’s matches between 2015 and 2017, of which 29 were concussions. Records going back to 1850 revealed 544 cricket-related deaths in Australia, New Zealand, Great Britain and Ireland.

Using data from La Trobe’s 2018 study, and its estimate of a head impact every 2000 balls and concussion every 9000 balls, Szymanski compared it with the number of balls bowled (1,012,160) during the 2019 first class men’s cricket season in Australia. He extrapolated a result of 160 head impacts and 37 concussions for that one season – almost four times current estimates.

According to Szymanski, that puts the rate of head impacts in the Australian domestic game two-thirds higher than the known rate in other cricket-playing countries.

“There are a number of reasons for this,” he says. “Pace bowlers in Australia tend to be faster, spinners deliver a lower share of overs, and the pitches tend to be quicker.”

He laments the lack of data kept on cricket, when compared with sports such as baseball.

“We’ve got [cricket] scorecards from before 1750,” he tells me. “Yeah, well, that’s not enough detail. What you need is a record of every stroke played, every ball delivered. That’s how you can do real performance analysis.

“There are about 200,000 events in a baseball season. And I can get 100 years of baseball seasons. Now, once you’ve got that data, I can do statistical analysis with it and start to identify different things.”

Innovations such as helmets have made a difference, the book says, and there have been just 10 recorded deaths among cricketers in Australia after the introduction of helmets, compared with nine in the previous decade – the 1970s.

But Szymanski says that, despite a decline in deaths, scientific evidence shows the danger of head injuries is greater than previously assumed, and growing.

“There are myriad theories for the increase in head impacts and concussions,” he writes. “Batting technique against short bowling is said to have deteriorated (caused by an over-reliance on helmets) … Limited-overs formats are blamed for encouraging batters to hook the ball more compulsively … Improved strength and conditioning has enabled players to bowl up around 90mph (144km/h) now more frequently than before. And there is simply more cricket played now.”

In March, Cricket Victoria and Cricket Australia cleared Australian batsman Will Pucovski to continue playing despite him having reportedly suffered 11 concussions, the most recent during a Sheffield Shield match in February. According to the two governing bodies, a panel of experts – including neurologists – believed some of Pucovski’s concussions had been misdiagnosed and were actually stress-related responses.

But despite the recent spotlight on concussion, the accumulation of data on the topic has still been piecemeal, and what information is available has often focused on injuries to batters and not other associated incidents.

Additionally, it is becoming clearer that both authorities and the media, over a long period of time, have failed to appreciate the pattern of repeated incidents and to report on them as such. This has contributed to a general nonchalance among players and the public concerning risks.

Cricket statistician Charles Davis found in a search of Trove in 2015 more than 90 separate cases of men, women and children killed by cricket balls from 1880 to the 1950s in Australia. They included players (most of them batsmen), umpires and spectators. Of these deaths, 33 were aged under 16. The youngest, a baby of 11 months, Annie Dennison, was struck by a ball in a backyard game in 1894.

Davis wrote: “Most of these events attracted only fleeting attention, with just a few lines of reportage and no follow-up. In the few reports where any implications were discussed, no one seemed aware of more than a handful of prior cases.

“It was certainly a surprise to find how many times this happened, and how young the victims often were.”

Unlike many statistical compilations, Davis’ work did not include heart attacks during games, which have also contributed to many deaths, but are no different to exercise-induced heart attacks in any sport. (Of this, I can also attest having had a teammate, friend and colleague – Bob Spivey, 56 – die batting in a match in Devon while captaining the Daily Mirror/Sun team the Badgers in 2005. Fare thee well, Bob.)

Szymanski concludes a better record of the game will ultimately reduce the chance of injury or death.

“I think the statistical era of cricket is in some ways beginning now, and will actually develop quite rapidly in the coming decades,” he says.

“Something I’ve always felt very strongly as an economist is you have to understand history, and you have to understand culture and how they interplay with one another … to go back and reconstruct from what data we’ve got, the historical record, in order to get a better picture.”

This story was originally published in The Australian Financial Review newspaper on November 12, 2022.