Why England don't need an anchor

Learning from the debacle against Ireland

I don’t really know where to start with any assessment of England’s disastrous World Cup loss to Ireland on DLS this morning. Firstly, on the subject of rain, it’s not that difficult to anticipate - weather radars do a pretty effective job of doing so and you’d like to think that someone in the England think-tank was monitoring these. Formula One teams - working in an ultra-professional industry where a split-second gained on a rival is gold dust - know pretty much to the minute when rain is coming, so there’s no reason why cricket teams can’t do at least a passable job of predicting when rain is likely to arrive.

England’s approach was seemingly of being blissfully unaware that the rain was coming. Chasing 157, you don’t play an innings like Dawid Malan did of 35(37) if you’re looking to get ahead of the DLS rate. On that subject, for every match at half-time, teams will be given DLS charts, even if the weather is 30 degrees and bright sunshine. So there’s no reason to think that England didn’t know where they needed to be in order to get ahead of DLS before the impending rain.

However, the DLS discussion is simply an appetiser to today’s entree.

It is my view that over recent years, England have been good at T20 but this has been generally despite (not because of) the strategies which they have adopted. Selection appears (and continues to be) confused, and there also appears to be a lack of role clarity for certain players, which also aligns itself to putting square pegs in round holes. However, they do have a high-quality player pool which has tended to bail them out of tough spots in recent years.

Firstly, in terms of role/selection, any sane team shouldn’t be utilising their best player of spin at number six. They also shouldn’t be using one of, if not their most destructive batter at number seven. Is it like the school team? Because you bowl, you can’t bat towards the top of the order so everyone else gets a go?

One man that mantra doesn’t seem to apply to is Ben Stokes. Shoehorned into this England team batting in a key role at number four (a role far more suited to the three batters batting below him), he’s able to open the bowling as well, with little evidence in recent years that he’s an above-average T20 player with either bat or ball. Stokes hadn’t played a domestic T20 this year, and as we’ve seen with players from other countries when they’ve missed big chunks of T20, this is a format that evolves rapidly and players had better evolve with it, or they will miss the boat. In domestic T20 from 2019 onwards, Stokes is 25/130 with a boundary percentage of 17.6% and a six percentage of 4.0% - put simply, if this wasn’t Ben Stokes but merely a random player, they’re not getting picked.

There appears to be a continual infatuation with certain players being ‘big-match’ players, and this argument appears a lot for those supporting the Stokes pick, which I mentioned prior to the tournament was a pick I wouldn’t have made. In truth, there isn’t a big enough sample size available for pretty much any player for any observer to be confident that any historical data would be repeatable in the future. In my view, the ‘big-match player’ argument is a viewpoint which is far from evidence-based, and evidence-based decision making has to be the minimum standard required for national teams. It’s the very least that their supporters deserve. Plus, if big tournaments go wrong, it’s a lot easier for evidence-based decision-makers to argue that they made the right decisions which didn’t end up going well, as opposed to making decisions on whims or, to use a popular current phrase, ‘vibes’. Going evidence-based might just save people their jobs at some points in their careers.

It doesn’t help that Stokes (10.25/97.61 this year in T20 internationals at the time of writing) appears to be playing something of an anchor role as well, a role which England quite obviously don’t need anyone else to play. They already have Dawid Malan playing that role, although to Malan’s credit, at stages this year prior to the World Cup he had looked to bat in a more positive style. Malan, at least, has done reasonably well playing an anchor role and would do an effective job for bowling-strong teams who, due to the strength of their bowling, can indulge in picking an anchor batter.

Conversely, bowling-weak teams cannot indulge in such things as anchors, and in particular, not two of them. Whether England know this or not (I hope they do, as they certainly should!), around 87% of T20 teams in non-tied matches win when they hit a higher boundary percentage than their opposition. The remaining 13% are lost for a variety of high variance reasons, such as the match going down to the wire, or the team hitting less boundaries hit more sixes (so the boundaries they scored were often worth two runs more). Or, the losing team who hit more boundaries accrued far more extras than they gave to their opposition.

I firmly believe that understanding the benefits of winning the boundary percentage count is akin to basketball’s ‘three point moment’. With this in mind, you can see how winning a T20 match is a two way street between run scoring and run prevention, largely comprising of boundary hitting and boundary preventing. So, if you’re good at boundary-preventing or run-preventing (a bowling strong team, such as Australia), you can indulge anchors because you are expected to concede a lower than average percentage of boundaries. But if you’re bad at boundary-preventing or run-preventing, like England are, you can’t indulge anchors with the bat because with the ball, you’re expected to concede a higher than average percentage of boundaries. A poor boundary-preventing team should, quite simply, have no choice but to pick an array of intent merchants among their batting group, and ensure that these intent merchants use a significant chunk of the team’s batting resources if they are to realistically win the boundary percentage count in matches on a regular basis.

On a side note, this is why lower level international teams need to take a higher variance approach when facing bigger countries with more resources. Scotland, for example, should always look to pick the ultra-aggressive Olly Hairs against the biggest teams because if he has a day out, he could win a match single handedly - they need to understand that they will be likely to concede an above average runs/boundaries against these better teams and structure up their batting accordingly. Against worse teams, perhaps at associate level in qualifiers, such an aggressive batting strategy is less applicable.

Rationalising this is a very important point. When I say that I wouldn’t pick Malan for England (and would pick Ben Duckett instead), it’s not that I don’t think Malan is not a good fit for play international cricket. More accurately, it’s that I don’t think Malan is a good fit for this current England group (because they are bad at boundary-preventing/run-preventing).

With England also having conceded a relatively poor non-boundary strike rate in T20Is from 2021 onwards (quite possibly a by-product of too many 30+ year old players in their team - it has happened to CSK too) with only Zimbabwe and Sri Lanka of the current Super 12 teams having a worse NBSR conceded from 2021 onwards, it is clear run prevention isn’t England’s strong point. They have no choice but to pick attacking batters to combat this issue.

Do England know all of this already? I genuinely don’t know - I’ve never had any dealings with anyone at the ECB in terms of strategic discussion, and they’ve never reached out to me to see if I could provide any assistance in that area.

On that subject, I’ll leave it down to readers to decide whether England’s ignoring of a strategist who has worked in various drafts and auctions around the world, and has found numerous low-profile/high value recruitment picks in county cricket is a good decision.

However, if the powers that be in the England set-up do know all of everything that I’ve written here, then obviously there are some smart people who don’t get their own way in the organisation.