MARCH 19 — Experiments have repeatedly proven that if you spin a coin 100 times, the number of heads and tails, assuming the coin is not weighted, will be roughly 50/50. And if you perform 1,000 spins, it will be very close to 500/500.

But if you only spin that coin 10 times, the split could quite easily be 8/2 or 1/9.

This phenomenon is well known to statisticians, who are aware that the larger the sample size, the more accurate the results will be. Conversely, with a small sample size, the chances of a deeply inaccurate, wildly unrepresentative result become greatly magnified.

You can try it with anything. If you ask one person, for example, what their favourite colour is, the answer might be magenta and you could therefore assume that everyone’s favourite colour is magenta.

But you might have happened to stumble across the only person out of one thousand who would have identified magenta as their favourite colour, with 700 saying something more conventional like blue or red.

What I’m saying is basically straightforward: if you want to know more about something, you need to know more about it. Knowing less doesn’t really tell you anything.

All of this goes to show why we should not take the T20 Cricket World Cup, which started last week in India, too seriously.

T20 is a brutally distilled, vastly simplified version of cricket, whereby many of the skills required to succeed in the full form of the game are absent.

The most extended version of the sport, a test match, is a five-day trial of mental, physical and technical ability and endurance. It contains endless subtleties and intricacies, and gives all participants — batsmen, bowlers and fielders — the time and opportunity both to showcase their strengths and have their weaknesses exposed.

A test match which goes the full distance contains 450 overs (90 per day for five days, spread over a total of 30 hours of play). A T20 contest, by sharp contrast, is all over and done with after a maximum of 40 overs and less than three hours.

It is, both literally and figuratively, 10 per cent of the “real thing.”

Whereas a test match provides a full and thorough examination of everything that can be done on the cricket field, and is played over a timeframe which generally allows the best team to win, T20 cricket is essentially reduced to big hits… and luck.

Bowlers are reduced from skilful and strategic manipulators who can slowly but surely probe for crucial breakthroughs to the role of sacrificial lambs, tossing the ball up for batsmen to demonstrate how far they can hit it before they happen to mistime the ball or miss it altogether.

T20 is one-dimensional. In “real” cricket, batsmen have to be able to slowly accumulate runs, taking advantage of errant deliveries to score but also possessing the necessary defences to protect themselves against good ones; in T20, there’s only time to treat every ball the same by trying to whack it and hoping for the best.

There is a great deal of skill involved in that, of course, but it’s nothing like the range of skill set required in the full version of the sport, making T20 mainly a question of form and fortune, rather than wider ability.

The element of luck is betrayed by the fact that the five T20 World Cups which have so far been staged since the inaugural event in 2007 have yielded five different winners. And the two countries who have dominated the test match rankings for the last decade, South Africa and Australia, have never won it.

Heck, even the West Indies, whose cricket entered a slide in the 1980s which is still continuing, managed to win the trophy in 2012. And even England — England! —which never wins anything in any of the sports it invented, triumphed in 2010.

Due to the arbitrary nature of the T20 format, which is almost exclusively a test of hitting the ball a long way, freak results can happen. Such as, for example, Oman beating Ireland in the first group stage last week or, in past events, the Netherlands defeating England or Zimbabwe overcoming Australia.

None of those results occurred because the winners were the better teams. Rather, like tossing a coin 10!times rather than 100, the limited nature of the contest gives more room for luck to take control. The sample size is too small for the outcome to be meaningful.

A comparable event, perhaps, would be a football tournament which consisted of nothing but penalty shoot-outs. It would be dramatic and exciting, and a limited degree of skill is involved, but it wouldn’t really tell you anything about who are the best footballers.

The T20 World Cup is already proving a great spectacle, providing some wonderful entertainment and exciting cliff-hanging finishes, and it can be fully enjoyed on that limited and superficial basis.

But as a test of sporting greatness, you might as well just throw a coin in the air.

* This is the personal opinion of the columnist.