Sport without spectators is not sport

For roughly the past two decades, the analytics crowd has peddled the idea that sport is essentially maths, that what unfolds on the field of play is predictable and intelligible if viewed through a proper algorithm.

Occasionally, that crowd has been right. And in many ways, the pandemic sports environment was an analytics aficionado's dream, a chance for games to unfold in a laboratory, free of noise, both literal and figurative, that can turn an expected outcome into a beautiful mess.