Hitting Against the Spin: How Cricket Really Works

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When doing data analysis, you can then look to objectively prove whether a longstanding idea is a tethered cat or a fence.

If you’re interested, you can find more of my batting footwork tips in the post linked here! Try To Play ‘With The Spin’ More Often Than Not And yet it’s still great, just because this is so massively unlike most sports books. What if it wasn’t about teamwork, or inspiring coaching or captainship? What if it was just about understanding what the data tells us and then doing that? What are all the different sorts of ways that data can be used to play, coach and manage the game differently, and what happens when you use it in that way?This and many other lessons are set out in his new book Hitting Against The Spin, which seeks to explain some of the game’s hidden patterns and overlooked trends. Why India produces relatively few left-handed batsmen (largely because spin is a bigger threat in the early overs). Why Nasser Hussain was (statistically) right to bowl first at Brisbane in 2002. And why the frequent incantations for fast bowlers to “just pitch it up” often do more harm than good.

They found that if you looked at three metrics in the years preceding a World Cup, they were strong predictors of how well a team would do at the World Cup. These three metrics were run rate (runs scored per over) in the 2 years before the World Cup, winning percentage in the 2 years before and total number of matches each of the players had played. Chesterton’s Fence (a story made up by the writer and philosopher G.K. Chesterton to illustrate conservative thinking): It is similar when we are analysing or collecting data in any area of work, which has not been studied before. Will the data prove any current ideas to be a tethered cat or a fence?Some of the content that follows is pretty technical, and there were a few passages I struggled with, but that says more about me than about the way the book is written. An example looks at the importance, or not, of bowlers maintaining a good length as opposed to a full length. The ability that the authors now have to record every detail of every delivery makes this sort of examination possible. It has come far too late to have any impact on the way I play the game of course, but it will alter the way I watch it and, more importantly, the judgments I come to about what I see.

We are all loss averse, genetically programmed to be, and straying from the accepted path carries a twofold risk, firstly the increased failure rate of the innovation, and secondly the increased criticism and loss of standing that will accompany any failure (72). – Shooting 3 points, running on 4th down, reverse sweep.” The stuff I’ve just explained is hard to do! It takes a lot of practice, but reading my Ebook first will give you a lot of helpful pointers! If you want to become a very successful batsman and move up through the ranks of the sport, then you’re going to have to learn how to do this. Take A Few Deliveries To Get Yourself Comfortable

Success!

The idea being that you shouldn’t remove a rule or tradition unless you understand why it was first put in place. Zubin Barucha, ‘and so they’re playing game theory too, and trying to push you up. So the strategy going into the auction was very simple – we have to spend ninety percent of our money on eleven players and then just wing it from there (334). – On Ben Stokes RR 2018 auction A monk adopted a cat, but the cat would always distract all of the monks while meditating. So they tethered the cat before evening meditation every day. However, over time this became tradition, so when the cat passed away, they went and got a new cat, and also tethered that cat before evening meditation. Loved that the book is updated enough to talk about the 2019 World Cup (that was 2 years ago!), and yet talks of Australia's 32 year unbeaten Test run at Gabba (:D)

The increased success of left-handed batsmen was a direct, unforseen consequence of better umpiring” (363).When you’re in a battle with a spin bowler, it’s important to not allow them to settle into a rhythm of bowling exactly where they want to. Spinners love nothing more than being able to bowl their line and lengths and land ball after ball in the same spot, while a batsman plays defensively. The worst thing for a spinner to bowl against is a batsman that takes calculated risks and puts them under pressure. This makes it harder for them to find a bowling rhythm! Here are some other quotes that were quite revealing, but to understand the true context, you should read the book. 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.