Hitting Against the Spin: How Cricket Really Works

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It was like analysing the songs of Justin Bieber alongside the works of Beethoven and Bob Dylan or Uwe Boll alongside Stanley Kubrick! An example looks at the importance, or not, of bowlers maintaining a good length as opposed to a full length. As much as I find the zenith of the game to be Test match cricket, it is undeniable that the white ball game, and in particular T20 has had a major and compelling impact since it's inception.

The only cricket book they had that I didn’t already own was this one, so that meant it was the one I picked up. They analyse the unseen hands that determine which players succeed and which fail, which tactics work and which don’t, which teams win and which lose. For a book that claims to be heavy on statistical analysis, it doesn’t give anything like enough weight to probability or take enough account of the counterfactual. Strangely, the book contained only one reference, and a tangential one at that, to Duckworth-Lewis, a subject which I'm sure would have warranted an entire chapter of its own. I can only assume this was an attempt at taking readers through ideas step-by-step, but it leads to pages and pages of unnecessary visuals that break up the flow of the writing.

I really wanted to like this book--to read about how one could use basic numeracy skills to get a deeper understanding of cricket, and explode some myths (or at least question some received wisdom) about the game. I wouldn't recommend it if you didn't follow cricket or thought Geoffrey Boycott was a brilliant analyst but it started off well and kept my interest to the finish. The traditional opener at Arundel has long been dispensed with, sadly, but Kent will be one of the few counties to entertain the tourists. There are some lovely insights from data on how cricket has changed and yet how orthodoxies have remained.

Today we can track every ball to within millimetres; its release point, speed and bounce point are measured as are how much the ball swings, how much it deviates off the pitch, the exact height and line that it passes the stumps, and multiple other variables.Also, since the story of sports and evolution is relatable across different kinds of sports (and non-sports fields too), non-cricket fans could end up enjoying this book. As someone who is a great fan of cricket and has a large knowledge of cricket it was rare to find a book that challenged my perceptions of how the game operated. In an era of big-data, how are leaders in sport, business, politics and education supposed to use the power of this new tool productively? But with this lack of attention to detail in the book, it is very hard to enjoy, and I find myself putting it down again after a few pages and a few charts. It’s credited to two authors but at least one chapter has an authorial “I” and you have to deduce that’s Nathan.

Chapters were often linked to specific seasons or teams, which meant they had relatable case studies and weren't just abstract, and there was also less extrapolation of what could happen in future. He might as well have been talking about himself - a Maths graduate and professor who ended up as the analytical brains behind the 2019 title winning England team. At a time when women’s cricket is becoming increasingly popular, I would urge the authors to make the pronouns in this book gender neutral, and also to draw insights from the women’s game as well as the men’s game.My interest in T20 has heightened after reading the chapters about data analysis in t20 tournaments which seem to create the best circumstances for data driven insight in cricket. As far as Part 1 of the book is concerned however I have no hesitation in declaring that my initial misgivings on the subject of Hitting Against The Spin: How Cricket Really Works were entirely misconceived, and I have little doubt but that Part 2, which comprises around a third of the book’s bulk, will be just as fascinating to those who enjoy the T20 game. Only criticism was boring and tiresome final chapters on the IPL and PSL as these chapters will date very quickly, provide little insight to take away with for future thinking and sort of filler stories. Every now and again a new book slips under my radar and, very occasionally, that is because I have allowed it do so. Leading cricket thinkers Nathan Leamon and Ben Jones lift the lid on international cricket and explain its hidden workings and dynamics - the forces that shape cricket and, in turn, the cricketers who play it.

There is nothing wrong with going to a T20 bash a few times a season, having a great time and then forgetting all about it and never watching Test cricket, but if that is you, this may not be of interest. Pronouns are always “him” and there are very, very few comparisons made with any female sports at all. Very likely you will learn something from this regardless of how many years you've played, coached or watched cricket in all its forms. Assuming, BazBall will stay, I hope the authors come up with the second edition telling us exactly how this changed Cricket.It's focus is on using economics-style quantitative analysis to explain trends and developments in modern cricket. Hitting Against the Spin' is an object lesson in how to use data and analytics to elucidate the science and structure of cricket. Although I never want to get hooked on the shorter versions of the game, they are often tremendously exciting and it is to the authors' credit that they address this form of cricket at some length. Every book of this sort needs its quotable quirks, and this one had tethered cats and Chesterton's fences. They begin with a couple of salutary tales, the Taoist monks and their tethering of cars, and a GK Chesterton homily about fences and, at a stroke, I began to understand where they were coming from.