Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc

An analysis of fallacious beliefs during ICC Cricket Worldcup 2019

The Cricket Worldcup has been entertaining billions of people since 1975. I may not be the biggest fan of Cricket, but the ICC World-Cup 2019 was definitely a memorable one for me, albeit not for the reasons you may think. For me this worldcup was a good lesson in logical and sound thinking; an example of post hoc ergo propter hoc and other fallacies.

Cricket is one of the world’s most popular sport. Viewership for some games can be as high as one billion people, which is proof of the fact that the sport is by no measure a casual one. For decades it has had a deep divisive and unifying impact on countries and an influence that extends even into the political sphere. (Look up: Cricket Diplomacy)

Last year, Pakistan for a brief moment became the center of the spotlight for an unusual reason; and no, it had nothing to do with the actual performance of the team. Rather, it was the eerie similarity between the team’s Worldcup winning performance of 1992 and the 2019 worldcup that gathered attention. By the 7th —of the 9 games in the fixture scheduled— news channels, social media websites and online articles exploded with incredulous claims supporting a logical fallacy. To describe news-space, the following headlines trending should make the case:

• Pakistan’s Eerie Symmetry with 1992 World Cup After New Zealand Win Has Stunned Shashi Tharoor — News 18
• 1992 all over again as Pakistan take identical World Cup path — Dawn
• Is Pakistan repeating 1992 Cricket World Cup history? — SBS
• ICC World Cup 2019: Pakistan’s results in 2019 eerily similar to World Cup winning campaign of 1992 — Hindustan Times
• World Cup 2019: Pakistan were in similar position after six matches in 1992 World cup — Indian Express
• Will history repeat itself? Pakistan’s World Cup 2019 results eerily similar to 1992’s — The News Minute
• The eerie similarities between 1992 and 2019 for Pakistan — ESPN
• Pakistan doing in same manner as they did in 1992 — The News
• History stands with mercurial Pakistan this World Cup — The Gulf

I wasn’t there in ’92, but I can understand how special this worldcup would’ve become for all those fanatics who witnessed the historic day.

Game “analysts” and “conspiracy theorists” started reinforcing their biases by digging even more parallels between the two worldcups. Weather conditions, location, type of wins and even the first names of the players were matched to strengthen their story.

“If Pakistan wins the Worldcup, in 20 years, Cricket Captain Sarfaraz Ahmed would become the Prime Minister of Pakistan”, a friend mused, as he likened the cricket captain of 2019 worldcup, Sarfaraz Ahmed to 92’s cricket team captain, Imran Khan — who is currently the Prime Minister of Pakistan.

What happened post 7th game is rightfully a great example of a logical fallacy called Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc. Translated, it means “after this, therefore, because of this”. It is the fallacy of inferring that one event is caused by another merely because it follows the other.

Pakistan, just like in 1992, won its remaining games, but…

…still failed to qualify for the semi-finals.

The team simply didn’t earn enough points to make it to the top 4.

The team came very close to what they did in ’92 but they still lost, marking end of their tour. If there was any silver lining to the loss, then it was that a disaster in logical thinking crashed before it turned into a ridiculous superstition.

Winning the world cup would have been a great thing. It would have had an uplifting effect on the people of Pakistan who were suffering from austerity under the poor socio-economic conditions. But at the same time Pakistan team’s efforts would have been undermined by these ridiculous calims as well.

Analyzing it, the worldcup would have caused two logical fallacies:

1A) During the tournament— Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc:

Premise 1: Pakistan won their games in a certain order in ‘92
Premise 2: Pakistan is winning their games in this order in ‘19
Hypothetical Conditional Premise: If Pakistan wins in the order of ’92, then Pakistan will win the Worldcup
Antecedent: Pakistan is winning in the order of ‘92
Conclusion: Pakistan will win the Worldcup

The argument above is incomplete. There are assumptions that strengthen and weaken the case but aren’t mentioned explicitly. These assumptions are.

Assumed premise 1: The two cricket Worldcups are similar
Assumed premise 1a: Number of teams in ‘19 is same as in ’92
Assumed premise 1b: Number of fixtures in ’19 is same as in ’92
Assumed premise 2: Winning is determined on games won and lost

The first premise is partially correct while the second premise is factually incorrect. For 1b, there were 9 instead of 8 games in ‘19. And for 2, the team with the highest number of points would win the tournament.

Based on these two facts, the main argument breaks down for two reasons:

1. The stakes needs to account for one additional game to make a fair comparison, which messes up the initial comparison since the teams can have vastly different performances in this extra game. There is also no agreed method to order the sequence of 8 games in 9 slots to make the comparison. And even if we suppose that wins are chronologically related and we charitably give the additional 9th game to Pakistan (which it did win in reality), we can discount assumed premise 1b.
2. Since winning itself is determined by the sum of the points earned in each game, even after matching the wins from ‘92, there exists a very large number of possibilities within the range of the total points earned that leads to multiple outcome. Therefore, the sequence should play an insignificant link to winning the worldcup.

It is to be noted here that there is also a problem of the correct use of induction. The antecedent “Pakistan is winning in the order of ’92 therefore Pakistan will win the worldcup” was based on an unfolding trend that was unfound. Clearly the argument was not built on a strong justified belief, as the trend itself was still presenting.

For arguments sake, let’s take the scenario that Pakistan did end up winning the tournament. What would have that meant?

Two different arguments would’ve emerged in this scenario:

1b) After the tournament — Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc (if Pak had won)

Premise 1: Pakistan won their games in a certain order in ‘92
Premise 2: Pakistan won their games in this order in ‘19
Conclusion: Pakistan won the worldcup because it won each game in the order of ‘92
Sub-conclusion: Pakistan wins the worldcup when it has similar patterns to its ’92 worldcup

As mentioned in the last argument, there are certain premises that are assumed in these types of arguments. In addition to those, there is one more assumed premise for this scenario:

Assumed premise 3: There is a well-established causal connection between patterns of winning the games in a fixture and winning the tournament.

This assumed premise is also incorrect. Winning of the tournament depends on the points and not the games themselves. In the context of our scenario that Pakistan won the tournment in ’19 because it had a similar sequence of events in ’92, the supporting premises are awfully weak due to lack of an established theory that supports it. Furthermore, there isn’t a large enough sample size to create and test a causal framework. That data simply does exist because there hasn’t been enough tournaments (especially worldcups) in the past 44 years.

The second argument would’be been:

2) After the tournament — Historical Fallacy (if Pak wins)

Premise 1: Pakistan won their games in a certain order in ‘92
Premise 2: Pakistan won their games in the same order in ’19 as of ‘92
Premise 3: I recognized the pattern early in the tournament
Conclusion: I always knew that Pakistan would win the Worldcup

This fallacy is one we often encounter in our daily lives, especially when we make bets. Philosopher John Dewey is credited to formalize this psychological logical fallacy in 1896. The fallacy in the context of our argument states that, the arguer falsely assumes that his act of recognizing patterns caused him to know that Pakistan would win the worldcup, though this claim only came up after Pakistan had won.

Here is a good example of what this fallacy looks like in simpler terms:
“A man has lost his wallet but can think of several places where he might have left it. When he finds it in the first place that he looks, he assumes falsely that he knew where the wallet was all along. His error is to suppose that a state of affairs arising from the process of looking (knowing where the wallet is) was in fact the cause of the process.”[source]

Superstitions and Cricket

Fallacies like Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc is the basis of superstitions around the world. It is a departure from logic and critical thinking and there is a thriving industry that exploits peoples poor reasoning ability while adding nothing to the social capital of a country. The market for placebo drugs, black magic, evil-eye, luck ornaments, palm-readers and astrologists are all examples of such businesses in this space. Science, mathematics and philosophy have given us better tools to reason but, in countries with weak educational foundations the people ultimately suffer from these counter-productive social norms.

For sports like cricket, which have deep colonial roots in developing nations, they have an unbelievable potential to influence the society. Most countries are still recovering from the imperialist colonial missions of the past and continue to struggle building solid foundations to a rational society. It is common for soothsayers to profit from these major sporting events by taking advantage of the fans superstitious beliefs. It is the responsibility, however, of the media houses to refrain from publishing irrational and fallacious content.

Superstitions don’t look the same as they did in the past; for example, erupting volcanoes linked to upsetting the Gods and Earthquakes causally linked to solar eclipses. When compared to such examples, cricket headlines may appear innocent. But the impact on people’s mind is real.

The reality

At the end, sports aren’t based on trends. Teams deserving to win, win because of their hard work and skill. Wins should not be related to superstitious beliefs as it is a mockery of the teams sportsmanship. And for that matter, a team does not deserve to win because their country needs a morale boost. Infact, arguments like this one is known as argumentum ad misericordiam, which is a weak argument that appeals to pity or misery

A perfect world where everyone is trained in critical and philosophical thinking does not exist, not yet at least. There is no justification of making people who dedicate their entire careers for the sport feel any lesser by crediting success to arguments of chance.

I hope that if someone sees a similar trend in cricket in the future, they can use the example of the 2019’s Worldcup citing:

“Remember Pakistan in the ‘19’s Worldcup? They thought they were repeating history, but history can only repeat itself so many times. Let’s wait and see which team performs the best”.

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About the author

Rayyan is an Ontology Engineer working for a startup in San Francisco. His work revolves around complex adaptive systems, systems thinking and software languages. You can mail him your thoughts and views at, connect@rayyanzahid.com.

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