Cricket’s great data debate: art v science

In an age when all teams are using computer analysis, a tactic isn’t good or bad because it looks that way, it is simply good if it works and bad if it doesn’t

Andy Bull
theguardian.com, Tuesday 3 March 2015 10.27 EST

The laptop is just another tool in the box, useless unless the players understand the value of the information it provides, and no more valuable than their own ability to adapt. Photograph: Tom Jenkins for the Guardian

ANALYSE THIS

In July 2007, after a history reckoned to stretch back almost 4,000 years, the game of draughts was finally solved. After two decades of work, a team of computer scientists at the University of Alberta finished sifting through the 500 billion, billion possible positions on the board. Their computer programme, Chinook, was now unbeatable. So long as neither player made a mistake, every game it played was guaranteed to end in a stalemate. Later that same summer, Peter Moores was appointed as head coach of the England cricket team. Moores was one of the new breed of coaches. A numbers man, and disciple of Michael Lewis’ much abused book, Moneyball. He even gave a copy to his batting coach, Andy Flower. Moores was so keen on advanced computer analysis that he used it as the sole basis for some of his decisions – the decision to recall Ryan Sidebottom to the side, for instance.

When Flower took over the team, he hired Nathan Leamon, a qualified coach and a former maths teacher, as the team’s analyst. The players nicknamed Leamon ‘Numbers’. He was extraordinarily meticulous. He used Hawkeye to draw up spreadsheets of every single ball delivered in Test cricket in the preceding five years. He ran match simulations – accurate to within 5% – to help England determine their strategies and their team selections. For the bowlers, he broke the pitch down into 20 blocks, each of them 100cm by 15cm, and told them which ones they should hit to best exploit the weaknesses Hawkeye had revealed in the opposing batsmen. Bowlers should aim to hit that particular block at least twice an over. Do that, Leamon told them, and they would “markedly increases the chance of success.”

England, it was said, were making better use of the computer analysis than any other team in the world. And it was working. They won the World T20, the Ashes home and away, and became, for a time, the No1 team in all three formats of the game. Leamon’s work was picked out as one of the reasons why. And yet now they’re losing, that very same approach is being singled out as one of the things they are doing wrong. You can see why. After England’s nine-wicket defeat to Sri Lanka, Eoin Morgan said “Going in at the halfway I think we got 310, probably 25 for both par, and again, stats back that up, par is 275, 280.” It was, Morgan thought, the bowlers who were to blame for the loss. They had delivered too many bad balls. He said he didn’t yet know why. “Over the next couple of days, we will get the Hawkeye stuff back and the proof will be in that.”

On Tuesday morning, Kevin Pietersen tweeted that England “are “too interested in stats”. He was echoing Graeme Swann’s comments from last summer. “I’ve sat in these meetings for the last five years,” Swann said. “It was a statistics-based game. There was this crazy stat where if we get 239 – this was before the fielding restrictions changed a bit so it would be more now, I assume – we will win 72% of matches. The whole game was built upon having this many runs after this many overs, this many partnerships, doing this in the middle, working at 4.5 an over.” Swann said he was left shaking his head.

Two respected players, both speaking from fresh first-hand experience, agree that England have become too reliant on computer analysis to tell them what to do. But balance that against the irritation old pros in all sports feel about big data. Just last week the great blowhard of the NBA Charles Barkley unleashed this tirade: “All these guys who run organizations who talk about analytics, they all have one thing in common – they’re a bunch of guys who have never played the game, and they never got the girls in high school, and they just want to get in the game.” Analytics, Barkley added, were “just some crap that some people who were really smart made up to try and get in the game.”

Barkley was shot down in flames. As Bryan Curtis summed it up in his wrap over on Grantland, commentators argued that Barkley’s rant was “unintelligible” and “wholly useless”, that he was a “dinosaur” who “didn’t even realize that the war is over”, and that “the nerds make the decisions”. In England though, where we’ve been slower to adopt analytics, the consensus seems to be that Swann and Pietersen are on to something. England’s over-reliance on the numbers has become a theme in the coverage of the team, particularly among ex-players. You can hear it when they bemoan, among other things, England’s reluctance to bowl yorkers at the stumps. That’s a tactic that has worked for years, one that has been honed by hard experience. But England’s analysis has told them that slow bouncers and full balls sent wide of off-stump are harder to score off.

The thing is, in an age when all teams are using computer analysis, a tactic isn’t good or bad because it looks that way, or because it is different to what has been done before. It is simply good if it works and bad if it doesn’t. The received wisdom is being challenged, and that’s a good thing. At the same time, cricket isn’t checkers. It can’t be solved by computer. It’s not a question of intuition versus analysis, or art v science, as David Hopps put it in a recent piece on Cricinfo. The laptop is just another tool in the box, useless unless the players understand the value of the information it provides, and no more valuable than their own ability to adapt and improvise during a match. If Swann and Pietersen are right, then England are wrong. At the same time, the lessons Leamon taught the team undoubtedly played a valuable part in their earlier success, something the sceptics seem to have forgotten.

WORLD CUP PROTEST OF THE WEEK

Courtesy of the Associated Press:

A handful of Pakistan cricket fans smashed eggs on their heads in anger Thursday after the country’s chief selector returned home from the World Cup in disgrace because he visited a casino. The frustrated fans at the airport chanted “Enemy of cricket Moin Khan” and “Get Moin Khan out” as the chief selector sneaked out of the airport in the southern port city of Karachi without talking to the media or facing angry fans. When the fans couldn’t see Moin at the airport they vented their anger by smashing eggs on their own heads.

No, me neither.

RHB BOWS OUT

In another week, Rory Hamilton-Brown’s retirement would likely have attracted a little more attention than it has since the news broke on Saturday. But between the World Cup, the League Cup, and the Six Nations the sports pages are already full, so he has slipped out almost unnoticed, his passing marked only in the local press and a couple of the more meticulous websites. He’s made one of those quiet off-season retreats to civvie street, the kind you only clock when you flick through the farewells in Wisden. Some casual fans won’t know about it till some time next summer, when they notice how long it has been since they last saw his name on Sussex’s scorecards.

Hamilton-Brown is only 27. He should be coming into his prime, but he has been beaten by a chronic wrist injury, something he’d been struggling with for the last nine months or so. He’s had surgery, been through rehabilitation and recuperation. It didn’t work. It was only last June that he made 100 runs in a championship match against Yorkshire. The curtain has come down so quickly. Perhaps the prognosis was too bleak, perhaps his spirit was spent, perhaps he simply had a better option somewhere else. He hasn’t let on, only issuing a short statement thanking his family, friends and team-mates. “I will leave the game with a heavy heart but take with me some amazing memories.”

An ill-starred end, then, to one of the more curious careers of recent years. It was only five seasons ago that Chris Adams made Hamilton-Brown the captain at Surrey, having just brought him back to the club where he played as a teenager. Hamilton-Brown was 22, and had only played nine first class games. But he had led his school side, Surrey’s Second XI and England U-19s. And besides, he had just got a copy of Mike Brearley’s The Art of Captaincy. Had it stashed in his locker.

Surrey were a mess. They had won one championship game in the last three seasons, had just released nine players and 19 office staff. They were, Adams admitted, a “dysfunctional and fragmented” squad. Appointing Hamilton-Brown was a bold decision, although some questioned the logic behind it.

So a man many resented ended up walking a harder road than most. Perhaps there was just a touch of inverse-snobbery to it too. Surrey were poor that first year, finished seventh in the second division, were out before the knock-out stages in both one-day competitions, and booed by their own crowd after a 10-wicket defeat to Gloucestershire in the T20. In the field, Gareth Batty and Mark Ramprakash seemed to be in charge as often as not. But by 2011 the team started to click. They won promotion, and the CB40 title too. Hamilton-Brown made 78 in the final, top-score in a chase of 189 from 30 overs. Surrey had gathered a good group of young players around Hamilton-Brown: Jason Roy, Stuart Meaker, Jade Dernbach, and of course Tom Maynard.

Then on 18 June, 2012, Maynard died. He and Hamilton-Brown were old pals from Millfield School, and had been sharing a flat together. They had been for a drink together at The Ship in Wandsworth earlier on in the night it happened. Things were different after that. They couldn’t but be. At the inquest it was revealed that Maynard had a cocaine habit. Jade Dermbach and Hamilton-Brown denied any knowledge of this.

In the immediate aftermath, Hamilton-Brown tried to play on at Surrey, something Adams should never have allowed to happen. Eventually he was given compassionate leave, and then the club allowed him to go back to Sussex. He had a full season there, and now he’s gone from the game.

When Adams made Hamilton-Brown captain, he said he did it because he wanted the club to be “young, fresh and brave”, qualities he felt Hamilton-Brown had in abundance. Hamilton-Brown has done a lot of living in the years since. He leaves the game sporting scars typically worn by people much older than he is now. Good luck to him.

STILL WANT MORE?

Goldenhair Gower and Freddy Flintoff both popped up in the lifestyle pages this weekend. Strikes me it’s time the pair of them were given their own odd-couple travel show. No prizes offered for guessing which is which from the following quotes:

“I had a reputation for being a Bollinger boy, but I’ve always liked claret. There’s a great synergy between wine and cricket.”

“Obviously I put smellies on. People take the mickey, but I use Joop. It’s old school and featured on Channel 4’s Dogging Tales.”

Gideon Haigh joined Geoff Lemon and Russ Jackson for the latest edition of Guardian Australia’s World Cup podcast.

Vic Marks celebrated Charlotte Edwards’ 200th match as England captain.

And Mike Selvey tried to unravel Colin Graves’ remarks about KP.