The celebrated Indian tennis player was by this time – June 13, 1988 to be precise – turning down the dimmer switch on a career that had seen him reach two Davis Cup finals and four Grand Slam quarter-finals at Wimbledon and the US Open.

He had beaten Ken Rosewall in 1973. He had beaten Bjorn Borg in 1974. He had beaten John McEnroe in 1984. On his day, this charismatic, sumptuously talented player could defeat anyone. But he had been unable to escape grisly ends in both of the feature films in which he had appeared in the years preceding this latest jaunt in south-west London.

“I died a pretty grisly death in Octopussy as James Bond’s contact man,” he told me. “Then I was the captain of an ill-fated starship in Star Trek IV. I seem to be dying in all my pictures.”

In real life, however, he was continuing to thrive as he headed for what he hoped would be a 17^th successive appearance at Wimbledon.

I asked him where he was on the computer rankings. His diamond ring twinkling in the summer sunshine, he replied airily: “I haven’t looked at the rankings for over a year.”

Personally, I celebrate this attitude. It may be luxurious – not every tennis player is able to supplement their living by film acting – but it is also glorious.

Which brings me to this week’s OptaPro Analytics Forum in Euston Square, London.

Wednesday’s gathering was the fourth such Forum to have been held by the highly successful gatherer of live sports data collection and, in the words of the hosts, it offered “some of the most innovative minds in football analytics the chance to showcase their work to over 250 delegates from professional football and elite sport”.

Clubs in attendance included Barcelona, Arsenal, Everton and AS Roma. Which figures.

Images and information from the Forum are all over social media.

A presentation entitled Cluster Efficiency and Frequency shows that fast attacks produce more dangerous shots.

In a still from a video recording, Everton’s Ross Barkley is frozen in time during a run towards the Arsenal defence and an unseen probabilistic decision tree. The probability of an immediate shot is two per cent. That of a pass and central shot is 4.5 per cent. That of a pass and shot from the penalty four per cent.

Other diagrams indicate probability of successful shots in the manner of temperature maps – red for higher probability, yellow for lesser. The contours flex and flow around the penalty area. It seems that the closer you get to goal, the better chance you have of scoring…

Another model predicts pass success from and to any location, calculating the completion likelihood from wide, from advanced wide, and from advanced centre.

We are here in the realm of the knowable, the recordable, the repeatable.

In a video clip explaining the basis of OptaPro’s operation, Alex Hollerith, software engineer and head of development, recalls how the data underlying the system was originally collected by observers.

“They were sitting in pubs watching TV and collating information about how many corners, how many goals, all of that,” Hollerin says. “That developed over 10 years to what you see now with all the technology being applied.

“Information is more and more important in our time. We collect data in order to help clubs, to support media customers and in order to create great products for fans.

“Every action that happens with a ball will be analysed during a normal football game, which means whenever the ball passes from one player to another player we record where it happened, when it happened and we also collect information about what exactly happened.

“As soon as an event is collected it is sent to a central database system. From there on the event takes a journey around the world. We push it out to various media, to customers, websites, broadcasters, whoever has a contact with us. We also put together post-match statistical packages with dozens of pages of data. We hand this over to managers who do then secret things with the data.

“Instead of taking gut feelings as basis for your decisions you have raw data which you can compare , that you can put into context.  The technology that we apply to sports is beneficial to the sport itself, to the teams, the clubs, players, managers. They are taking the data and putting that into their decision-making process.

“What we do also makes it more interesting for customers, for fans. It gives you something to talk about.”

Charles Ahenda-Bengo, mechanical engineer and Opta Sportsdata analyst, explains how he and a colleague will watch live feed from football matches and collect data on behalf of one team, noting each feature of play so that it is transferred to the software.

“Every time there is a pass we have to drag the line to the player who received the ball and then put his number on it,” he says. “As you become more experienced it becomes almost like second nature. It’s almost like playing a game.”

Now don’t get me wrong. I am not saying this information is without merit. Barcelona, Arsenal, Everton and AS Roma weren’t turning up for nothing this week and OptaPro’s burgeoning profile pays witness to the increasing desire for and reliance on figures within the wider sporting world.

One of this year’s key speakers, Dean Oliver, has worked for many years on collecting and assessing player data for top US basketball teams. He believes basketball is 10 years ahead of football in terms of using this information – so football’s course appears set.

But football is not a computer game. And while the where, when and what can be measured and tracked, there is no tracking the how. Or the why.

The OptaPro video has a short section in which we are introduced to typical stats – tackles made, passes completed successfully - from a match involving Sunderland. The stats show that Andy Reid has the lowest percentage of successful passes in the Sunderland team, 77 per cent, while all his team mates have figures in the 80s.

Well hang your head in shame Andy Reid. But what data do we have on how effective his 77 per cent of decent passes were?

What, I wonder, would OptaPro have made of George Best? You remember, he was that young Irishman who used to play wide, advanced wide and – come to think of it – advanced centre for Manchester United. He lost the ball quite often trying audacious things. Despite this, he was still what would nowadays be known as a great product for the fans. Sometimes he used to beat three or four men in succession, some of them more than once, and score a goal.

What would OptaPro have made of Best’s team-mate Bobby Charlton? Best and other team-mates would get onto England’s World Cup winner because he would sometimes lose possession with sweeping passes out to the wings. When they came off, these passes were glorious. But they were risky. No doubt his passes completed successfully stats would have been a bit Andy Reid-like.

Sometimes Charlton would swoop and swerve through a defence before smashing the ball into the net. That counts as a forward run and successful shot – but there is no measure for what such deeds did to the morale of an opposing team.

This is not to be a Luddite, but to point out that, when it comes to sport, the devil is not always in the detail. Measurement can only ever tell part of the story. The most important things can’t be measured.

Team spirit. Try and measure that. Leicester City’s former skipper Steve Walsh suggested this week that the reason last season’s Premier League champions are now dropping towards the relegation area is down partly to the fact that last year “a miracle happened”, but that this year “what also seems to be missing is that team spirit we had last year”. Go figure.

This week, at the World Grand Prix snooker event in Preston, former world champion Ronnie O’Sullivan responded as if he was a robot to questions from the BBC – in protest at being investigated by World Snooker over comments he made about the referee and a photographer after winning the World Masters title in London last month.

Acting like a robot to underline the fact that although he might be expected to behave like a robot, he actually isn’t a robot. Because human beings are not machines.

Vijay would be with you on that one, Ronnie.