So, the 60/40 rule doesn't work!

The end of The Hundred thoughts...

So, I’m currently on the train on the way home from a month away with the Birmingham Phoenix at The Hundred - what a month it has been!

Of course, I’m writing this a few days before I’d have liked to, with the Phoenix pipped for qualification on net run-rate having won five of our eight group matches (62.5%). At this stage, I neither have the time nor the inclination to check this, but I’m 99.99% sure that this is the highest win percentage for a team to achieve and be eliminated prior to the knockout stage of a major T20/short format cricket league without points deducted. However, if any reader does have the energy to do so, please let me know whether I’m right!

We might actually have to go another decade before a team winning 5/8 in this tournament fails to qualify from the group stages, and after Leicestershire won 8/14 and failed to qualify in the Blast as well, I feel like I’m due some luck!

Regular readers of my work will be familiar with my book ‘Strategies for Success in the Indian Premier League’, in which I talk about the 60/40 rule, which our season has just busted as well! Here’s a quote from it:-

“Unlike many other sports, the vast majority of T20 franchise leagues give no advantage to those owners with the deepest pockets. Teams are assigned the same recruitment budget to sign their preferred players and this, in theory, should generate a very level playing field.

Certainly, any T20 team in a level-budget league who can create a 60% or greater expected chance of winning a given match, has done a very good job in assembling a successful team. However, this still means that they’ve got around a 40% chance of losing the match, despite performing such impressive recruitment. Not only this, they’d have a 40% chance of disappointing their fans, a 40% chance of attracting media criticism, and most importantly, in a knockout match after the league season is completed, a 40% chance of being knocked out of the tournament.

This 60-40 rule is exactly why there is an inherent danger in reading too much into one-off results and performances. It also demonstrates why adopting correct processes are much more important than one-off results or whether a team wins or loses a knockout match, and why it is utterly irrational to demand a T20 coach wins a particular league. In reality, all a successful coach can be asked to do is to qualify from the group stages - a 60% win- rate will almost always do this - and then, ideally, put themselves into a position where they are 60-40 to win a subsequent knockout match. The rest is simply down to variance.”

Just as well I put ‘almost always’ in the final paragraph…

Here’s a table showing the group stage performance of all teams in the first two years of The men’s Hundred, sorted by points per game:-

I think if you’d have offered me 11-5 before the start of last year’s comp, I would have taken it - it beats the 60/40 rule, doesn't it!

In all seriousness, though, I travel home pretty proud of our efforts over the last month, a month where we were ravaged by injuries in particular. After we lost to Trent Rockets in the opening match, I remember reading a lot of uncomplimentary comments about our bowling attack on Twitter - I’d like to think that we proved those doubters wrong, and at the time of writing Tom Helm and Kane Richardson lead the wicket taking charts. Considering we were expecting to have last year’s best pacer Adam Milne available as well for the tournament this year, to have the current wicket-taking leaders again is a huge positive for us. Just keep trusting the processes…

As I always seem to be saying when I return from a tournament though, I feel like I’ve left the tournament a better strategist than when before I got there, and that can’t be a bad thing. Certainly I feel that I’m much more than the recruitment analyst which I probably was closer to when I first started working with teams a few years back - of course, I’ve built on those recruitment skills but now I also love working with players, constructing bowling and fielding plans, shot options for batters, and much more. Having a more rounded skillset was something I’ve been working towards for a while.

To finish, a couple of thoughts about the tournament. Those who are against the tournament on social media probably won’t want to hear this but I can genuinely tell you that the experiences that I’ve had in this tournament in terms of seeing how happy fans were, how much they enjoyed the game, young children (the future cricket fans and players) buzzing after having their cap or ball signed by Mo or Livi, or any number of our players who devoted so much time to the supporters after the match no matter what our results or their personal performance was.

I can remember after beating Southern Brave at Edgbaston we had probably 200-300 supporters waiting for us to by the team coach, cheering us on to it. The truly incredible thing about this was that they waited about 2 hours after the match to do this for us, something I’ve never seen in cricket yet. It was like after a football match.

A number of people I know have got into the tournament having never shown much interest in cricket, and just as importantly, their children have too. I know plenty of people who have collected the trading cards, and with the interest this tournament has generated, the future of the sport we all love is in safe hands. How the sport might develop may not suit the traditionalist, but there’s still plenty of interest in this great sport.

As for me, it’s time for a bit of a break and a holiday in September and to spend some time with my dogs and family - plus get my half researched and written Substack posts uploaded!

However, there will be news of a new project or two to announce soon, and I’m excited to announce my next adventure in the near future.