Andrew Mulligan: All to the power of 16

Shane Watson has been dismissed LBW 29 times in tests. Photo / AP

Opinion

There are many statistics that come out of sport on a regular basis; the All Blacks have a winning percentage of 92 per cent since the beginning of the 2011 Rugby World Cup, they have never lost to Los Pumas and Tony Woodcock is starting his 100th test tonight in Christchurch. All those make for impressive reading.

One stat that stood out this week, however, didn't really pertain to sport of any consequence. @Qikepidia stated on Twitter: "People in the UK are 16 times more likely to know the rules of quidditch than the rules of croquet".

For the uninitiated, quidditch is the game they played in the Harry Potter books and movies (they fly around on broomsticks which makes it like airborne combat juggling - but that's for another column, another day) and croquet is what pretentious hipsters play on Waiheke Island because petanque is too mainstream.

That got me thinking about what would we, as the sporting public, be "16 times" more likely to do than some other option. Here's what I came up with:

I'm 16 times more likely to be trapped lbw than Shane Watson, or to be eligible to play for the Oly Whites than Deklan Wynn if I wasn't in my late 30s, and be more likely to want to have a beer with Jimmy Anderson after a test match than Matthew Hayden.

I thought long and hard about this one, but I'm 16 times more likely to watch the Open Championship this weekend if Ryan Fox and Danny Lee make the cut (Fox and Lee - great name for a pub or buddy cop movie franchise). I'm also much more likely to scream "give it to Shaun" this weekend than I have been all season with the Warriors.

I'm also sure that the Roosters are planning a bubble-bursting, bandwagon-clearing game plan for the Penrose XIII but then I think of Shaun Johnson and how no one can escape from an impossible situation quite like Johnson - he's the "El Chapo" of the NRL.

I'm 16 times more likely to watch a Central Districts cricket game than not with Jesse Ryder involved this summer after his 10 for 100 yesterday in a four-day game for Essex (I feel as though Essex is the perfect county for Ryder too).

And I'm 16 shades of "ya don't say" that there has been a level of mismanagement of a couple of IPL teams and that the leader of the Tour de France is instantly riding under a cloud of suspicion. Incidentally, if you're a cycling team, storing valuable information in a cloud is also dangerous.

I'm also slightly less inclined to write off Israel Dagg than a lot of people have been jumping at the chance to. With Wayne Smith tweaking his defensive positioning and a forward pack that will be more direct in the coming tests, Dagg has "bounce back" written all over him. I am, however, 16 times more concerned if something should happen to Dan Carter before the end of October.

I'm also 16 times more confident that our rates in Auckland will be increased again in the next round of valuations.

Perhaps our money is going towards dedicated quidditch fields?