Jim Allan

I write about sport through the lens of data — not because the numbers are more interesting than the game, but because they reveal things the game itself can't tell you. I cover cricket and AFL primarily, with occasional forays into whatever statistical rabbit hole has caught my attention that week.

The work here sits somewhere between the academic and the accessible. I'll reference a regression model in one sentence and the Saturday afternoon game in the next. If that sounds like your kind of thing, you're in the right place.

I'm particularly interested in how teams make decisions under uncertainty, how individual performance metrics can mislead as much as they illuminate, and how the structure of competition shapes the numbers we observe. Cricket's expected run models and AFL's possession chains are endlessly fascinating to me — not just as tools, but as questions about how we understand sport.