The North v South Divide

Bias shows one huge flaw of the 'eye test'

I know a lot of people working in cricket. Players, coaches, other analysts, and more, and one of the big debates we often have surrounds the value of the ‘eye test’ - a person’s view of a player’s ability based on their eyes. This is often followed up by ‘I’ve played the game for x years, so I can tell’.

My view is that, when left unchecked, recency bias and cognitive bias have a huge negative impact when it comes to the eye test. Here’s a description of those two biases below:-

Wikipedia: Recency bias is a cognitive bias that favors recent events over historic ones; a memory bias

Simplypsychology.org: A cognitive bias is a subconscious error in thinking that leads you to misinterpret information from the world around you, and affects the rationality and accuracy of decisions and judgments. Biases are unconscious and automatic processes designed to make decision-making quicker and more efficient. Cognitive biases can be caused by a number of different things, such as heuristics (mental shortcuts), social pressures, and emotions.

It’s not difficult to see how those biases can creep into player analysis. When I chat with a player about who they rate, I usually check how that player performed against them, and almost always the player recommended performed well recently against the player recommending them - recency bias in full effect. There aren’t many players who have the skills to be part of a high-quality recruitment process.

Cognitive bias as well is dangerous. Imagine a scenario where you’ve been a coach for the same team as a hypothetical player for a decade. You’ve shared the good times, the bad times, and are probably are friends off the pitch too. It’s easy to see how emotions would play a part in, for example, the retention of that player when they’re clearly in decline.

You’re probably at this stage wondering what this has got to do with the title of this article - the North v South divide. Bear with me, because now I want to talk about the other flaw of the eye test - your eyes can only assess what you can see.

When speaking to people in cricket, I’m often amazed at how little they know about certain players, or even who they are. Particularly as a head coach you really should know about every player in the country, or find someone who does who can help you. Anything else is, in my view, completely unprofessional. How can you know if a player is talented when you’ve never seen them play?

On the flip side, that’s one huge benefit of using data with recruitment. You can cover every player in the world, and if used correctly, assess them without any bias. I believe that when done right, data and the eye test can be used very well in conjunction with each other, but you need to use data first to find a shortlist of players for a particular role, and then that’s where the eye test comes in, with - for example - a coach then watching video and/or the player live, who can then assess the shortlisted players and give, potentially a ‘double tick’ (data and eye test) to the player.

It is my belief that the majority of English counties could improve their recruitment processes, often quite markedly. Now, I’m going to use data to show why, and how these biases have a clear effect on team recruitment…