Column 7, 2015 – Bowling in a rigged game

Printed in The Cricket Paper, issue 110, Friday March 27, 2015.
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One of the game’s favourite clichés has recently been pulled from the dusty recesses of the pavilion to have the cobwebs brushed off it once again. It remains as true today as it ever was: the balance between bat and ball.

The recurring critique this month has been that the ODI playing conditions have tipped too far in favour of the bat. The three usual suspects hauled up to face the punditry committee are: “bats these days”; the rule change allowing only four fielders outside the circle; and a new ball from both ends.

The ongoing “bats these days” brouhaha deserves a column of its own, so let’s come back to that later. The other two are hard to argue with.

The four-men-out experiment has made the whole concept of defence, especially at the death, almost redundant. So much so, that even the ICC may have noticed, and there’s a reasonable chance we’ll see it revert back to five after the World Cup.

I’d love to see a return to the solitary ball, and with it the potential for fun stuff like sharp spin and reverse swing, but as it’s apparently beyond the wit of man to make a white ball that stays white for 50 overs, we’re probably stuck with two.

So as it stands the balance does seem skewed. All the more remarkable then, that despite the game being rigged against them, the cream of the world’s fast bowlers have put on quite a show.

Two thirds of Australia’s Mitchell triumvirate, Marsh and Johnson, have been quiet, but Starc has been excellent, as fine an exponent as you’ll see of the blisteringly fast late swinging yorker. New Zealand’s new ball (each) pair of Southee and Boult have also been exceptional. But for me it was two subcontinental quicks who have so far provided the best edge-of-the-seat moments.

The top “Hello, here comes the upset!” contender came courtesy of the tournament’s surprise package, the 90 mph Bangladeshi quick with cheekbones you could open letters with, Rubel Hossain. Fresh from gleefully sealing England’s early fate, when he tempted Kholi into a waft outside off-stump in the quarter-final against India, those Douglas Fairbanks matinee idol features were transformed by a primal war cry and, just for a moment, it all looked possible.

There was one spell though, that will outlive the tournament, just as the Donald vs Atherton encounter at Lord’s lives on in the memory, long after the series it was part of has faded. The brutal six over assault from Wahib Riaz in Pakistan’s quarter-final against Australia rendered such trifles as two new balls and four-men-out utterly irrelevant. The working-over he gave Watson was so comprehensive, so masterful, delivered with such tightly reined ferocity, that for those 20 minutes, the balance did indeed look skewed – the other way.

But then Rahat Ali shelled the hard-won top edge, the moment passed, the spell was broken, and the bat was back on top.

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Column 6, 2015 – The Triangle of Adequacy™

Printed in The Cricket Paper, issue 109, Friday March 20, 2015.
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After nets last week, over the couple of post-exercise pints we consider to be integral to ‘winter training’, Clive and I alighted on a surprisingly robust theory.

There is something about sitting in a fire-warmed winter pub in a slightly sweaty tracksuit that is conducive to such philosophical breakthroughs. Or maybe it’s just us.

It stemmed from how tricky it is to get people to come to winter nets. Whatever you organise – midweek, weekend, early, late, bowling machines or regular queue-up-and-bowl – the one thing you can be absolutely sure of is that fewer people will turn up than you’d hoped.

This led us to lament gloomily how generally unfair it is that some people don’t even need to bother practicing to be any good.

Now, this is a well worn path. Commonwealth table tennis champion turned sportswriter Matthew Syed wrote a fascinating book about it called ‘Bounce’.

There’s a popular theory called the 10,000 hours rule, which – and I’m heavily paraphrasing here – says that 10,000 hours of practice makes you a master. At batting, chess, piano, painting, maths, tiddlywinks. Anything.

Two other books that touch on it are Malcolm Gladwell’s ‘Outliers’, and David Epstein’s ‘The Sports Gene’ which expound the theory first put forward by a guy called Anders Ericsson in 1993.

They all pretty much disagree on the baseline though. Epstein, as his title suggests, thinks natural talent is an essential ingredient, Ericsson more or less rejects the concept of talent, and Gladwell is somewhere inbetween.

The lightbulb Clive and I had was not about 10,000 hours (which we’re a bit long in the tooth for) but a unified theory of the nature/nurture argument, and the balancing mechanism for what we concluded must be the three key ingredients.

These ingredients are: talent (ability, gift, aptitude), skill (acquired proficiency, experience, learned techniques), and work (practice, application, effort, hard yards).

Over the second pint, we christened this mighty triumvirate “the Triangle of Adequacy”.

Everyone’s triangle is a different size and shape. The baseline – talent – doesn’t move. You’re born with it. Work can increase your skill levels, but the more talent you had to begin with, the less work is needed to up those skill levels: those with limited ability must work much harder than the talented to achieve similar results. The harsh reality is, the gifted grafter is uncatchable.

Now, the cynical might argue that the triangle doesn’t make nebulous quantities like talent and skill any more knowable, and can only ever be hypothetical. But I think the combination of fairy tale anyone-can-do-anything optimism and Dirty Harry ‘A man’s got to know his limitations’ realism is potentially quite useful.

Basically, once you’re familiar with it, your own Triangle of Adequacy™ can tell you whether it’s worth putting in a few extra hours with the bowling machine, or whether you might as well skip it this week, save it for the season, and go straight to the pub.

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Column 5, 2015 – stats and creativity

Printed in The Cricket Paper, issue 108, Friday March 13, 2015.
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99.94. If you’re interested in cricket, you’ll know that figure, and the extraordinary achievement it represents. The batting average of Sir Donald Bradman is statistical royalty, up there in gold lettering on the metaphorical all-time honours board with Sachin Tendulkar’s hundred international hundreds.

Cricket loves stats. Tournament sixes, batting average, bowling average, economy rate, strike rate, run rate, highest this, fastest that. We love it all.

Barely a week passes without more statty fun. Last weekend Glenn Maxwell missed Kevin O’Brien’s fastest World Cup 100 by two balls, and Kumar Sangakara became only the second man in history to pass 14,000 ODI runs.

Cricket is just so measurable, it’s always been stat obsessed. The stats tell us what’s normal, what’s exceptional, what to aspire to.

Recently, much has been made of England’s turn towards data’s dark side. Under Moores and Flower, England put 100% of their eggs in the algorithmic basket.

When he was his boss the first time around, Moores gave Flower a copy of the 2003 book ‘Moneyball’, the story of Oakland Athletics baseball team and its manager Billy Beane (Brad Pitt in the Hollywood version) who used rigorous statistical examination of in-game plays and situations in order to base decisions on predictive data extrapolated from the computer analysis of historical likelihoods.

Did you enjoy that last paragraph? Welcome to the England dressing room.

After initial success, the long-term problem with this approach is that it stifles creativity. Modern cricket is increasingly creative and inventive. International batsmen must score quickly and powerfully all round the ground, bowlers need an armoury of unpredictable variations. The gameplans of De Villiers, Maxwell, Faulkner and Boult are not based on statistical analyses of the past – they’re inventing the new paradigm.

Try for a moment, just for fun, to imagine it’s your job to convince McCullum not to be aggressive between overs 10 and 35, because that’s when the MOST important thing is not losing wickets. Well, that’s what the stats say, Brendon.

In advertising, creativity is often steamrollered by research. If you let it, inoffensive banality will always trump inventiveness in the quest for the sale. It’s all about sales, that’s the measure. Be safe, do what works, trust the numbers. Apply that to cricket: do what works, what you must to win. Trust the numbers. Forget everything else. Winning is how we’re measured. Nothing else matters.

In both instances, the thinking is poisonous. If you look beyond the numbers at how the best really succeed, the answers are there. Flair, style, chutzpah, flexibility, the courage of your convictions – simple bottle. Get that happening, and the results will come.

Fun is a prerequisite for creativity. An ad-land pioneer once famously said that advertising is the most fun you can have with your clothes on. I would happily apply that adage to cricket. But England this winter didn’t look like they were having much fun. And, let’s be honest, 99.94% of the time, watching them hasn’t been either.

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Column 4, 2015 – Unearthly ability

Printed in The Cricket Paper, issue 107, Friday March 6, 2015.
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Some years ago we played a Saturday league game on scruffy council pitch in the middle of a housing estate somewhere north of Salisbury. They were a side formed from several merging entities, so we knew a few faces, but hadn’t met them as a team before, and had no warning their number four would be anything special.

It was probably around three quarters of the way through his double century that we began to suspect.

We later discovered that he was a mate of a mate, roped in at the last minute. It was his first game for them – his first for anyone in a year. Since his Hampshire trials, in fact, with his flatmate, James Vince. By the time we got to the pub that evening to report back, he WAS James Vince.

That same year we played a big club who had a 19-yr-old with a chip on his shoulder. He’d been dropped from the firsts to open for the thirds. It was unclear whether he’d been dropped because he had a chip on his shoulder, or he had a chip on his shoulder because he’d been dropped. Anyway, he was cross. Cross enough, and good enough, to race to a ton, including a venomous flat six straight back over the bowler’s head and through the pub window 100 yards away like an anti-tank missile.

These instances felt iniquitous at the time, but they are part of cricket’s fabric. It is, as the cliché goes, a team game played by 11 individuals, and the colossus among the pigmies is the norm. Most teams have one guy who could easily play at a higher level, and, if he comes off, can win it on his own.

It just feels a bit unfair when they’ve literally dropped down from a higher level.

In top flight cricket, by definition, there isn’t a higher level to drop down from. And yet the casual observer of this World Cup would be forgiven for thinking that’s exactly what’s happened.

Chris Gayle’s double ton against Zimbabwe was arguably an actual different league: a second XI attack with no answers to the finest cow-corner slogger on the planet. But two others defy such convenient explanation.

Last weekend Brendon McCullum dismantled arguably the best pace attack in the world like he was the local pro bringing upstart kids down a peg or two, charging 90mph quicks from ball one and slapping them into the stands with open contempt.

And the way AB DeVilliers eviscerated the West Indies looked not so much a different level as a different game. A game where one routinely sweeps fast bowlers for six from a yard outside off. On one knee. With one hand. Without so much as a by-your-leave.

With apparent precognition and inhuman reflexes, it’s as if DeVilliers and McCullum have dropped down from The Gods XI, to show the mortals how it’s done.

And yea, they did smite them.

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Column 3, 2015 – Cricket's gateway drug

Printed in The Cricket Paper, issue 106, Friday February 27, 2015.
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Sunday 28 August 2005, 8.4 million people watched the climax of the Trent Bridge Test on Channel 4, breaking the record of 7.7 million set two weeks earlier at Old Trafford. The conclusion at The Oval dipped to 7.4. But then, it was a Monday afternoon.

Wonderful though the 2005 Ashes was, it only became part of the national conversation that summer because people watched it. Ordinary people. People who don’t follow cricket, much less have trenchant views about who should bat three or the importance of a four-seam attack. Normal people saw it, and got swept up in its drama.

For this very reason, Britain has listed ‘crown jewel’ sporting events, regulated by the government. There are currently 10 events from The Olympics to Wimbledon protected for live broadcast on free-to-air TV, and nine protected for highlights.

Around the millennium, amid howls of protest, the ECB campaigned to have cricket de-listed, so they could “negotiate a fair price”. They succeeded. That Monday afternoon at The Oval almost 10 years ago was the last live international cricket on UK free-to-air TV.

It’s no coincidence that those were the last England cricketers to transcend their sport. There were Freddies and KPs in every playground – I now play with and against them every week. The ECB argued that Murdoch’s money would fund grass-roots cricket. Others, that the next generation of kids won’t want to emulate Moeen Ali or Joe Root, for the simple reason that they won’t know who they are.

With grim inevitability, this is proving to be the case. A national playing survey published last year showed participation levels in cricket have ‘plummeted’. The ECB has pledged to reverse the decline with ‘new initiatives at grass-roots level’, presumably using some of the £70 million a year they get for making it inaccessible at grass-roots level.

In recent weeks the clamour to reinstate free-to-air cricket has grown. Bosses at Yorkshire and Surrey have been vocal about it in the wake of the success of The Big Bash, which is free-to-air in Australia, (though on Sky here,) as is most cricket.

This is complex stuff. If you can afford it, Sky’s coverage is excellent. And it’s doubtful there’s much appetite among free-to-air broadcasters for a sport that takes ages, and (a circular argument but a fair point) hardly anyone watches anymore. Where cricket is still free, it’s riddled with rampant commercialism and relentless advertising. There isn’t a simple answer. It’s not exclusively cricket’s problem either. This month BBC lost The Open to Sky. The Rugby Six Nations is up for renegotiation.

In the 2013 home Ashes, the highlights beat the live show. Channel 5’s highlights were seen by 1.5 million, while just 1.3 million watched live on Sky.

So ITV’s daily World Cup highlights are very welcome. And while 10.30pm is not exactly kid-friendly, the door is at least ajar for that all-important audience – the one that doesn’t yet know it’s the audience.

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Column 2, 2015 – Unintended consequences

Printed in The Cricket Paper, issue 105, Friday February 20, 2015.
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My favourite umpiring conundrums are satisfying because they’re ultimately logical. They work out – there is justice, a correct answer.

The last ball of a match. The batting team are nine down, scores are level. The bowling team need a wicket or a dot, the batting team need one run.

Pretty good, right? This is edge of your seat stuff, even before the batsman is stumped off a wide.

So. What happens? Quite a head scratcher, isn’t it?

The answer is simple chronology. A wide cannot be called until it passes the batsman, and as such might not be called until after the stumping has occurred. But once called it is deemed to have been a wide from the moment of delivery, so the extra run is credited before the wicket and the batting team win.

Simple, eh? Straightforward, logical, understandable.

Now. Let’s turn our attention to the last ball of the England v Australia game last Saturday.

England were nine down. James Taylor was given out LBW by the on-field umpire, which was overturned on review by the third umpire. During the kerfuffle, Taylor and Jimmy Anderson attempted a leg bye and Jimmy was out of his ground when the wicket was broken. After the Taylor decision was reversed, Jimmy was given out, run out.

Now, that is a genuinely dreadful decision. I mean truly, embarrassingly, are-you-seriously-professional-umpires bad. That ball could not have been more dead. It was an ex-ball, nailed to the proverbial perch.

The ICC later issued an acknowledgement (not an apology) that “the game ended incorrectly and an error was made.”

ICC Playing Conditions, Appendix 6, DRS, rule 3.6 a) states “If… an original decision of ‘Out’ is changed to ‘Not Out’, then the ball is still deemed to have become dead when the original decision was made (as per Law 23.1(a)(iii)). The batting side, while benefiting from the reversal of the dismissal, will not benefit from any runs that may subsequently have accrued from the delivery had the on-field umpire originally made a ‘Not Out’ decision.”

Clearly the umpires were wrong. But just as clearly, that DRS rule needs a bit of work, doesn’t it?

Last Saturday, England’s position was hopeless. The umpires not knowing the rules did not alter the result, it just denied Taylor his ton, stranding him on 98.

But let’s imagine for a moment a less hopeless situation. Get back on the edge of your seat.

Nine down. One behind. Last ball. The batsman is struck on the pad and the ball races away for four leg byes – the batting team win! But the bowling side appeal for LBW – it’s given! Then overturned on review! The batsman is not out, but the leg byes don’t count because the ball is retrospectively dead – the bowling side win!

Is that really how we want the World Cup Final decided? I think someone might need to take a long hard look at Appendix 6, rule 3.6 a).

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Column 1, 2015 – Phil Hughes

Printed in The Cricket Paper, issue 104, Friday February 13, 2015.
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The Cricket World Cup starts tomorrow, and cricket’s oldest foes meet in Melbourne. One name will not be on Australia’s team sheet, but will be on everyone’s mind.

It’s two and a half months since cricket changed more profoundly than any new rule, format or TV rights deal will ever change it.

A man was killed. He wasn’t a soldier or a test pilot, living with death every day. He wasn’t a racing driver or a mountain climber, who accept the possibility that one day their sport might exact the ultimate price. Phillip Hughes was a cricketer, killed playing cricket. People don’t die playing cricket.

Death is part of life, and youth cut down in its prime, its potential forever unfulfilled, is never less than tragic. But this one we felt particularly keenly. People don’t die playing cricket.

How decent a guy he was or how good a player he was should have no bearing on how we feel about a 25 year old killed at the crease. And yet it does. Hughes was an unorthodox swashbuckler of a batsman, and by all accounts attacked the rest of his life with similar zest.

The cricket world – fans, players, media, administrators – has never felt more united to me than it did that week. The game’s vibrant and highly engaged twitter community, whose default mode is sarcastic snark, perhaps epitomised the depth of feeling. #putoutyourbats was a poignant and understated expression of solidarity, mourning and respect from all corners of the globe. Google it if you didn’t see it. You won’t be sorry you did.

Twitter was not all that was elevated by the tragedy.

Australia’s captain Michael Clarke, besides being prodigiously gifted, has always come across as a bit brash, a bit pleased with himself. A modern celebrity, with all the trimmings – supermodel on his arm; supercar on his drive – a shallow, showy metrosexual.

I don’t recall ever having my impression of a public figure so quickly and comprehensively reversed.

From his statement on behalf of Hughes’ family at the hospital, to the Cricket Australia press conference, to publicly supporting Sean Abbott (who bowled the fatal bouncer) with the words “when you feel like getting back on the horse mate, I promise I will be the first to strap on the pads and go stand up the end of the net to hit them back at you,” to the heartbreaking eulogy at the funeral, he was a model of articulate dignity. He did his country, his sport, and his best mate proud.

If Hughes has a legacy, I hope it’s that. Cricket rallied because of his death. It gained perspective. It remembered that it’s just a game, and yet the game is what’s important. Clarke concluded his eulogy: “We must cherish it. We must learn from it... And we must play on.” If we’re lucky, perhaps the game will manage to retain that sentiment in Hughes’ memory. For while it has indeed played on, cricket will never forget Phillip Hughes.

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