Whether it’s in how the game is written about or how it’s played, we’re told the numbers are more important than ever before
Sharda Ugra08-Apr-2016The ICC World T20 has left many, me included, wallowing nostalgic about T20. No one could have watched the last two overs of West Indies v England on April 3 and not felt their pulse quicken.A clarification, though: it’s not T20 per se that produces such thunderous, operatic endings. It’s the “I” that follows – “I” for international, whose quality and context makes the game visceral, memorable, its echoes resounding for longer than the noise and clatter of T20 franchise games.The World T20 has reminded us once again of the finest qualities of cricket’s shortest formats, and led to much rumination. Not just about the return of the yorker, the muscle of the big hitter, and the deep, improvisational beauty of classical strokeplay. What professional observers, analysts, narrators and storytellers are asking themselves is: how do we possibly do justice to this format, veering as it does between and bubblegum? How must its narrative be fashioned?Articles from former England captain Mike Atherton and Suresh Menon recently have raised the question. David Hopps offered us the dystopian voice of a robot cricket writer. (What joy that would give the one-eyed fan who doesn’t like his team and anyone on it, masseur included, criticised ever.) How can T20 be written about in a way in which it will be relevant to its times and the audience (predominantly male, 16-45) it is being written about for? Suitable in both form and content for an age where words are digested through mobile phones?Like the format does cricket, could T20 compress the match report into bite-sized chunks, with the longer form left over for Test matches and whatever will remain of 50-50? Could T20 make cricket journalism go the way of the American Beat poets of the post-WWII era, or the gonzo journalists of the 1970s – like T20 itself, dismantling convention, orthodoxy and accepted structures. The T20 “word count” could be shrunk into tweets: ten per innings, a match report told through 20. When asked to summarise the World T20 in a tweet, ESPNcricinfo’s readers sent in, among others, this one:
#WT20inatweet Dottin to Perry —WW1. Stokes to Brathwaite. 6666. Champion Dance. A Mayhem of joy.
— Ant (@LeftArmCricket) April 4, 2016
Can’t T20 stories be told through haikus, quatrains, sonnets?Copy desks over the cricket world are no doubt rolling their eyes, but don’t tell us we didn’t tell you. In the quick, quantifiable world of T20, there’s an increasing possibility that the word picture narrative could in the future be dismissed as mere whimsy. Here in the #livefornow moment, form is temporary, class is overrated, data is everything. Never mind the words, contemplate the numbers.T20 has already sidelined established parameters and keeps gophering into greater detail. Averages and RPOs are so 20th century, what counts now are dot-ball percentages and BpB (balls per boundaries). There can also be established, through reams of data and coding, a “relative value” of a player, by comparing his contribution to the game to that of the rest of his team-mates. It will determine whether his performances – strike rate for batsmen and economy rate for bowlers – were on par, less or more than those of his mates. Percentile cricket, if you please.In T20 at the moment, data – or rather its usage – is territory that is, if not disputed, certainly debated: between the number crunchers and the playing community, over whether match tactics must be driven by data or by a mix of personal knowledge and what the numbers suggest.Anil Kumble, champion bowler and Indian cricket’s radical thinker, pushed for the use of video and data analysis by the Indian team in the early 2000s. Today most Ranji Trophy teams travel with their own analytics man.To Kumble, who has been involved with Royal Challengers Bangalore and Mumbai Indians across eight IPL seasons, data starts by being “a number”. He cites an example: a bowler is told that data has proved that nine times out of ten if he bowls a yorker somewhere around the leg stump in his first three balls to a particular batsman, the batsman is dismissed. “But what if the bowler says, ‘No, no, I’ve got him out before with bouncers.’ Will you go with the data and go with the yorker? Or will you go with the bouncer, saying, no, this is my experience?”Data dependency, at the moment, says Kumble, is a choice between two varied worlds: “You could always go one route of only using data and picking the team based on that. In the other, you can look at data and at how receptive the players are and how naturally they can adapt in certain situations.” People in charge of dugout management must, he says, try and get more information, identify patterns of play, spot player personality and game characteristics over short periods of time, but – and here’s the key – sift and simplify.”At the end of it, you as a coach or someone assisting him, need to get the data across to someone so that he can understand it. But also, you don’t want too much of it.”Data, Kumble says, “is everywhere and it certainly helps… teams, the development of players, in planning strategy against individual players and teams. How you pick up the relevant data, assimilate it to strategise and manage, that is up to the individual. It depends on how receptive a particular captain is and how he looks at it.”
In T20, the use of data is territory that is debated: between the number crunchers and the playing community, over whether match tactics must be driven by data or by a mix of personal knowledge and what the numbers suggest
T20’s current tactical plot line suggests that the playing community does worry that the men behind the computers would rather data rule. Ask Subramanian “Ramki” Ramakrishnan, founder-director of SportsMechanics, the company that the Indian team first engaged for analytics. He argues, “We are not seeking to replace the gut feel of the players. What we are trying to do is to add a quantitative layer to their gut feel, so that the outcome of it is always perfect.”How does that work? The quantitative layer, he says, will suggest a remodelling of the game’s established order, even in something as new as T20. The over-blocks – Powerplay, middle and final five – need to be broken down further. Cricketers perform better, Ramki says, if given small targets. Which is why splitting the game into three-over blocks would ensure that “the dugout is always on top of the game”.Which dugout would try to control Chris Gayle or Rohit Sharma or David Warner? In theory, though, the numbermeisters say that a simple data-driven instruction – “get 40 off five” – leaves a player to focus not on the scoreboard but the task at hand: whom he is going to score against, how, and in what target areas.In the World T20, South Africa captain Faf Du Plessis did make a reference to breaking up the Powerplay into three-over sets. The idea of a bite-sized innings within an already bite-sized game is one that takes getting used to. Ramki says, “The player is used to the scoreboard and playing by himself. The older players don’t like someone coming and telling them… Younger players are more adaptable because they are in their formative years and are able to take to a new idea and accept it.”This storyline is not the weary one that journalists argue over, about focusing on process and letting the result take care of itself. This is a process driven towards the very purpose of a result. Kumble says, “I’m sure that slowly people will start accepting that data is more accurate.” That comes with a competitor’s rider, though: “I would rather decipher my own data… use my cricketing knowledge and acumen to arrive at what the data is showing me.” Writing in December 2014 in the business newspaper , Kumble summarised an observation by American astronomer Clifford Stoll into these pithy words: “Data is not information, information is not knowledge, knowledge is not understanding, and understanding is not wisdom.”T20 is a little over ten years old, and franchise T20, its datamania version, about eight. On the outside, we’re currently on a trek somewhere between data and information. Knowledge and wisdom? Let’s talk about that stuff ten years later. In free verse, if necessary.
