Challenging Cricket's Conventional 'Wisdom'

What do Brentford and Brighton’s owners have in common?

If you answered that they were both running clubs who have outperformed expectations, currently in the Premier League while performing excellent recruitment, you’d be right. Except that’s not the answer I’m looking for.

If you answered that both their owners have backgrounds in data-driven professional gambling, or were football’s answer to ‘Moneyball’, you’d be right. Except that’s not the answer I’m looking for.

If you answered that both their owners run teams who use methodology which challenges conventional wisdom, you’d be getting closer. Specific focus, perhaps, should go on the recruitment side of things, where a mindset appears to exist where players are purchased primarily on the back of data. Brentford have been pretty open about discussing this, with real discussion on the value of understanding the standard of various leagues around the world in comparison to English soccer, and while Brighton appear to be a little more cautious in their media discussion about data-driven recruitment, it’s difficult to envisage head coach Graham Potter scouring Europe on his own and finding players from the Czech League and J-League in Japan to sign - leagues which they purchased players from this summer.

There are several other examples of English soccer teams taking a similar data-driven approach. Barnsley, notably, under the ownership of Chien Lee’s NewCity Capital group, and Peterborough, whose owner Darragh MacAnthony is not shy of expressing his recruitment ideas on his ‘Hard Truth’ podcast.

What’s the common denominator? They’re all performing far above their status, and budget, in soccer. That’s because they’re using data as a primary source to recruit players. Of course, they’re going to research ‘soft’ factors subsequently, but without the data to source the players to start with, an incoming player is almost always not going to arrive.

While it’s difficult to establish this with sheer certainty, another common denominator appears to be that the recruitment group at the club get more say in recruitment than the head coach, who may not get much say at all. Teams might say stuff like ‘we will never sign a player that a head coach doesn’t want’ but good luck to a head coach for staying in their job who rejects five potential wonderkids in a row found by the recruitment group’s algorithm, particularly if those potential wonderkids turn out to be actual wonderkids worth tens of millions of pounds.

The logic behind this is simple. Some will be better than others at it, but a head coach is usually a head coach because they’re a good coach, not because they’re a particularly skilled at player recruitment. So it makes sense for them to focus on what they’re good at, and delegate the responsibility of recruitment to someone who is actually good at it.

Moving back to a cricket context - after all, that’s the nature of this Substack - it’s fair to say from my experience that cricket is far behind football in this respect. Many teams will actually just listen to agents opinions when signing players, as opposed to hiring a recruitment analyst who actually could help them save money by making better recruitment. Some teams almost always pick players from the same agency as well, but that’s probably a story for another day.

But, my opinion is clear - the majority of head coaches in cricket should not have a major say in recruitment, and there are a number of reasons for this, and I’ll list a few below.

1) Head coaches are time poor. Imagine the life of a county coach in England. From March to October (at least), they are travelling around the country playing matches most days of the week, organising training sessions, having management meetings, taking care of media responsibilities, and many other jobs besides. Based on that, do you think they’ve got time to watch franchise T20 leagues on a regular basis? How can they find the time to find the next superstar spinner from Afghanistan? They can’t. It’s that simple.

2) They are not necessarily skilled at recruitment. As many football teams have found out when promoting their assistant manager to head coach, there is a vast difference between improving a player via coaching, and identifying talent.

3) There is a huge risk of recency subjective bias in their opinions. Obviously I’m not going to say who it is, but I actually know of an example of a player who was recruited because he was ‘a good bloke’. Being a good bloke goes a long way in cricket, if you’re a player. But this isn’t even one of the most worrying areas of subjective bias…

I know a lot of players, and they’ll often tell me a player who they think is good. I’ve got into a routine of checking how these recommended players did against that player’s actual team, and 90%+ of the time, you’ll find that they played well against them recently. The problem here is that head coaches in cricket also listen to the opinion of their players, which isn’t a great idea either - particularly as many players don’t know what is good or bad when it comes to statistical metrics.

Coaches are the same too. They are going to be influenced by players who have played well against them. It’s a simple trait of the human mind to do so. More often than not as well, overseas coaches in T20 competitions don’t have the best understanding of the local player pool as well, which is clearly a huge problem in drafts and auctions.

Let’s now move on to captains. Yesterday on Twitter, I asked a question to my followers ‘Which captains in the modern T20 era add considerable tactical value to their team?’.

Some answers included MS Dhoni. That’s probably fair enough - he’s noted as an extremely astute captain, and I can’t have many arguments with that suggestion.

Several others suggested Eoin Morgan and Daren Sammy, which is where the debates start. Presumably they mean the England version of Eoin Morgan, rather than the T20 league version of Eoin Morgan, who has a far less impressive record. Daren Sammy has a decent record as captain, but also was captain for a number of years over a pretty mediocre St. Lucia side.

A couple of other responses were interesting:-

‘I’m often sceptical of how good captains are tactically’

‘I haven't paid enough attention to who is a great captain, but I'm pretty sure when most people say someone is one it means their team wins a lot.'

I’d largely agree with the above two quotes. My own opinion is that captains are like fielders. By this, I mean that in T20 cricket, over the course of a big sample size, about 90% of fielders are +/- 1 run in an innings, with a few outliers - the really good or really bad fielders - either side of this. Most fielders, by definition then, are pretty midrange. Captains, I think, are pretty similar. You have a few who are very, very good, like Dhoni, and you have a few who are very, very bad. It’s obvious who those bad captains are - they have no clue with match-ups at all - but of course, I won’t name them.

Generally speaking, my view is that most captains are often simply senior players with their results generally relating to the resources given to them. Do we really know if Eoin Morgan is a great captain because of his record with England? It’s impossible to say, because we don’t know whether England would have had a worse or better record with, say, Jos Buttler as captain instead. Would he have been able to get a team with far less skilled players to overperform to a huge extent? Again, we don’t know. Does his record - and will the record of his eventual successor, for that matter - benefit from England having the most talented white ball batting group in the world, whose fourth team’s top six would still be better than many other international team’s first-choice top six? I’d say that’s very likely.

The problem is that captains often have a huge say, and often the final say, in team selection and this is the other piece of conventional ‘wisdom’ which I want to challenge. They run the risk of the same subjective and recency biases as coaches do with recruitment, but if most captains aren’t tactical geniuses, should they really have the final say in team selection? I don’t think so. Would Harry Kane pick the England football team?

In my view, there should be three key people involved with team selection in cricket - the strategy analyst, the captain and the head coach. The analyst presents, the three people debate and then the head coach makes the final call - after all, ultimately, it’s his head on the chopping block…

As readers of my first few Substack articles will know, they have largely been opinion-based so far, but those readers who are keen for their fix of data won’t have to wait long, and most of my upcoming articles will be very data-driven. Next up is a deep dive into the CPL so far.