Deep Backward Point

The England-India Cricket Veterans Memorial of 2011

Let’s hope I don’t have to add more names before the summer is over.

In hindsight, it would appear that baseball was a sport designed by statisticians. Each ball is a discrete event with a finite set of possibilities: ball, strike, foul, hit, out. Each possibility has a distinct impact on that batter’s outcome. A ball increases the probability of a walk. A strike and the first two fouls increase the probability of an out. Hits and outs are results in and of themselves. Coupled with the fact that each team plays at least 162 games a season in the MLB, a huge sample space, and you get a game where you can hope to predict a player’s performance over a season.

That’s Moneyball.

Cricket, however, has the space between. The fact that Dravid plays a cover drive straight to the fielder has no direct impact on his probability of being out. Sure you can make tortured claims about how “when Dravid plays a cover drive to the swinging ball at the beginning of his innings, he scores 34 runs on average”. But that’s conditional probability based on a very small sample space. What you might be able to do in cricket is what Andy Flower does. More accurately, what his Cambridge mathematician Nathan Leamon does:

The boy’s gone to town and then some. England’s enthusiasm for Hawkeye extends way beyond the DRS – they’ve used to it log and analyse every ball delivered in Test match cricket around the world in the last five years.

That’s where I’d start. Leamon claims that this is how they got Tendulkar in the recent series. I’ll wait for more evidence before I believe it’s working, but they’re on the right track.

The next step is what they already do in baseball. Go back to every game over the past ten years, track the trajectory of each ball and predicted point of impact with the ground. Armed with that information, and the truth of what actually happened on each of those balls, you can “predict” what would happen any time in the future when a batsman hits a ball at a particular angle in a particular direction. You can say 32 degree trajectory hit to 4 o’clock is out 57% of the time. 12 degree trajectory hit to 7 o’clock is out 9% of the time, but predicted number of runs are 1.2. This allows you to assign real predicted run values to batsmen.

Sure a young batsman with a few games may average 75, but you know that if all his shots had been fielded/caught based on historic precedent, he would have only averaged 22. Of course, this model does not account for run outs– which are substantially different in cricket when compared with baseball– but it’s a start. The Old Batsman raises a valid concern:

Moneyball worked for Billy Beane in part because every franchise plays hundreds of games per season and the vast majority aren’t watched by the other coaches and teams. Test matches are much rarer things, and are more closely observed.

Of course, IPL games are not as rare. And there is significant financial advantage to finding a hidden gem. Predicting a Valthaty is worth a boatload of money. This is what Billy Beane did for years with the always cash-poor Oakland A’s in  Major League Baseball. The Old Batsman continues:

And Moneyball only really worked until all of the other teams knew about it and started using the same information. Once they did, the variables of power and money that Beane had overcome reasserted themselves.

Yes, but until then, there is money to be made.

In the crazy ride that is Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, Jay and Silent Bob find themselves on a set where Ben Affleck and Matt Damon (playing themselves) have the following exchange:

Matt Damon: Just take it from “It’s a good course.”

Ben Affleck: Oh, now you’re the director.

Matt Damon: Hey shove it, Bounce-boy. Let’s remember who talked who into doing this shit in the first place. Talking me into Dogma was one thing, but this…

Ben Affleck: Hey look, I’m sorry I dragged you away from whatever-gay-serial-killers-who-ride-horses-and-like-to-play-golf-touchy-feely-picture you’re supposed to be doing this week.

Matt Damon: I take it you haven’t seen Forces of Nature?

Ben Affleck: You’re like a child. What’ve I been telling you? You gotta do the safe picture. Then you can do the art picture. But then sometimes you gotta do the payback picture because your friend says you owe him.

[They both take a beat and look at the camera]

Ben Affleck: And sometimes, you have to go back to the well.

Matt Damon: And sometimes, you do Reindeer Games.

Ben Affleck: See, that’s just mean.

I can imagine Rahul Damon and Sachin Affleck having a similar conversation. In this tortured analogy, Test cricket is the gay-serial-killers-who-ride-horses-and-like-to-play-golf-touchy-feely-picture. Twenty20 is the safe picture. Test cricket is The Talented Mr. Ripley. Twenty20 is Reindeer Games.

See, I don’t usually like Twenty20. I think it’s a waste of talent and has perverse incentives. It’s fun sometimes, if I’m in the mood and if it’s a good game. Put another way, I like it when a Twenty20 game is Bourne Identity, but most games are like Reindeer Games. So I don’t bother watching many. The hit ratio is too low.

Test cricket is like indie or art or foreign film, and I love a good obscure film. It’s long, confusing, sometimes in a foreign language, and usually has a meandering unsatisfying ending. But we don’t watch for the ending, we watch for the journey. I want to be challenged, I want to have to rethink what I believe in. This is Test cricket.

But what Ben Affleck taught me is that it’s unreasonable to expect a world where the world keeps churning out artsy film. There is no business model for someone like Damon to keep at it. So they have to mix it up, and I know that, and I respect that, and I don’t have to sit through everything they put out if I don’t want to. I can wait for the good stuff. And with Twenty20, they can afford to make the good stuff.

The Indian cricket team has had their best moment of the decade and their worst moments of the decade within five months of each other. Let’s pick apart this corpse. Scalpel?

The Best of Times, the Worst of Times

First, there is a little hint as to the cause of death in these extremes: India’s best came in a limited overs tournament at home. India’s worst came in an away Test series.

A Rant

Upfront, let me get this rant out of the way. First, a few assumptions:

1. A different set of skills required for Twenty20 cricket when compared with Test cricket. They overlap, but not by much. Especially for bowlers.
2. Twenty20, and specifically IPL, is here to stay.
3. The financial incentives associated with Twenty20– specifically, the incentive imbalance– are here to stay.

This creates a lot of conflicts– for players, for the management, for every member of the cricket establishment.

We essentially have two different sports competing for the same set of resources. It’s like cricket and hockey were both called cricket and the teams for both were selected from the same pool of players. I don’t see a path for sustaining the bowling quality in all forms of the game without widening the talent pool and managing both formats as separate sports.

In short, there is a path from being an awesome Test bowler to an IPL star. There is no path in the opposite direction. Incentives must be developed if quality is to be maintained.

Somerset

Day one of the tour game against Somerset was the first clue: 425/3 in 96 overs. But India are slow starters abroad, right?

The last day saw India lose 7 wickets for 21 runs in 15 overs. Slow finishers as well.

A Bowling Failure

India took 47 wickets in four Tests in 732 overs. Even in the tour matches, the bowlers managed 12 wickets in three innings across 220 overs.

It got progressively worse: 34 wickets in the first two Tests, 13 in the next two. You can’t win a Test match with bowling like that, regardless of how well you bat. The batsmen stood a chance at Trent Bridge, but their best case in every other game was a draw.

Of course, draws would have been awesome.

On Batting

Sure, the batsmen failed as well. Except for Dravid.

Dravid did the opposite of failing, though I wouldn’t go as far as calling anything on this tour a success.

But I don’t think the batsmen should take even half of the blame for the series defeat. Sure, they are the stars. They are the best in the world. I can explain why, but I’ll let the always eloquent Kartikeya Date do it for me:

The batsmen were failing MA examination questions, while the bowlers were failing 8th grade examination questions.

The most disappointing thing about the batting is that everyone– everyone— got good starts in the first couple of Tests. Thirty, fifty balls or more the get their eye in.

And then, swat outside off-stump. Out.

Especially in the first Test:

• Mukund: 120 balls for 61 runs
• Gambhir: 102 balls for 37 runs
• Tendulkar: 116 balls for 56 runs
• Dhoni: 152 balls for 44 runs
• VVS: 149 balls for 66 runs

That’s a travesty.

Praveen Kumar

The one positive from the series. Some may take Dravid as a positive, but really this is his last hurrah. Or second, or third last. But he will not be back in England for a Test series again.

Praveen will. I hope. We said the same thing about RP four years ago, and look– he came back.

Ok, bad analogy.

Outplayed

Of course, after four Test matches that were not even close, there isn’t any one thing you can point to as the cause of death. India were categorically outplayed, in every aspect of the game. You can blame the BCCI, or the IPL, or injury management, or talent management, but all of that is trying to explain away the simple fact.

That England is better at cricket.

Recently, the great Ramachandra Guha wrote an article on Shastri and Gavaskar for the Kolkata Telegraph and Cricinfo. It’s meaning was not clear to mere mortals. Here is a translation:

Guha: Surely many MCA members would have voted the other way if Gavaskar and Shastri had publicly endorsed Vengsarkar? [..] Why? What would it have cost Gavaskar and Shastri to ask the clubs of Mumbai to cast their votes in favour of the man who was far and away the better candidate?

Translation: Since I’m not a journalist, but writing an editorial, I can pose questions without asking affected parties for their statements on the record.

Guha: The recent revelations that they are paid propagandists of the Board of Control for Cricket in India have confirmed, for many other fans, the lack of principle in Gavaskar and Shastri.

Translation: Rather than explain the truth of the situation, which would have taken about 16 words, I chose to boil down a nuanced situation to two words: “paid propagandists”. See above statement re: not being a journalist.

Guha: My impression, based on press reports and conversations with friends, is that the fans felt more let down by Gavaskar than by Shastri.

Translation: I hate Shastri.

Guha: Gavaskar has answered the charge that he is a spokesman for the board by claiming that his newspaper columns have sometimes been critical of its policies. However, in hundreds of hours of hearing Shastri and Gavaskar speak on television, I cannot recall them ever being critical in any way of the BCCI.

Translation: Gavaskar is a liar either because I have watched and read everything he’s ever said, or because I chose not to do any actual research for this article. See above statement re: not being a journalist.

Guha: My view, and not mine alone, is that the existence of the IPL is the main reason India is no longer the No. 1 team in Test cricket. [..] One would expect Gavaskar and Shastri, as active, influential, full-time commentators on the game, to make these connections between the board’s obsession with the IPL and the poor performance of the Indian team in England. That they have stayed silent suggests that their commitment to cricket is not as dispassionate as it perhaps should be.

Translation: I hate the IPL. Implies everyone with integrity hates the IPL. Implies Gavaskar and Shastri must hate the IPL to demonstrate their integrity. Quad Erat Demonstrandum.

Guha: [W]hy must they be so blind to the ways in which the IPL is bad for Test cricket in India? Having watched them, time and again, help Mumbai defeat my own state, Karnataka, I wonder: why could they not support their former team-mate in the MCA elections against a cricket-illiterate politician?

Translation: Again, they disagree with all truth and freedom loving people.  Again, I pose questions whose answers are a phone call away. See above statement re: not being a journalist.

—
P.S. Outside of this article, I think really highly of Ramachandra Guha as a writer. As with Yudhisthira, this article caused his chariot to fall halfway to earth.