Twenty20 cricket is easy to deride. This is a format invented by a marketing survey. Its surrounding razzmatazz – everything from pitch-side jacuzzis to cheerleaders to all those nicknames, deliberately ludicrous and yet instantly forgettable – has often seemed designed to make spectators forget that they were actually watching cricket.
Yet take a step back from the surrounding glitz. What you will see is a game that, because of its very youth, is evolving at a rate that might be unmatched throughout all sport. With every year cricketing received wisdom takes another hit: T20 unsentimentally disregards the sport’s old tropes unless they deliver victories.
“You have to be a lot more precise because you have no time to make adjustments. In Test matches you assess by sessions; in one-day cricket you assess by overs; in T20 cricket you assess by balls,” explains Phil Simmons, who coached West Indies to victory in last year’s World Twenty20.
That West Indies team have a fair claim to being T20’s greatest ever side. On the field they married unrivalled six-hitting depth with canny bowling that combined spin, pace and chicanery. Less well-known, in defiance of the image of a triumph for raw skill over planning, was the team’s reliance on data. Every day during the tournament Simmons talked to Gaurav Sundararaman, the team’s consultant analyst, for half an hour or more. “He was a very good help in going through the opposition and things that we could try on different grounds,” says Simmons. “The thing about data is it’s how you use it. Our players used it very well.”
Data informed the West Indies’ decisions during the tournament. They knew that South Africa struggled against spin, so played an extra spinner and used Chris Gayle’s off-spin for three overs against their left-handers. Andre Russell’s poor economy rate at the death led to him bowling earlier in the innings. When batting, Russell was told to anticipate the slower ball, which had dismissed him 15 times in T20 games in 2015; he did so spectacularly during the epic semi-final run chase against India. And they opened with a spinner, Samuel Badree, in every match; spinners are consistently more economical than quicks in the opening overs.
Statistical analysis encouraged West Indies to invert one of cricket’s great axioms – to always bat first. West Indies won the toss every game, and chased every time: “A huge advantage,” Simmons reflects. Last year, 72% of teams in T20 cricket decided to bat second; 55% of games were won by the chasing team.
Perhaps most significant was West Indies’ embrace of boundary-hitting above all else. In their semi-final heist of 193, the West Indies’ batsmen played out 50 dot balls, 23 more than India - but hit 11 sixes to India’s four. As balls whizzed off Caribbean bats like fireworks set off into the night sky it reflected a batting approach that prioritised strike rate over average.
The West Indies’ strategy recognised a common refrain of analysts: wickets have been systematically overvalued in T20, holding totals back. The average team loses only 5.8 wickets an innings, and big-hitters are often wasted too low in the order. Realisation of this is pioneering radical new approaches to batting, embodied by Sunil Narine in this year’s Indian Premier League. Normally a bowler, Narine was promoted to open. He was dismissed once every 10 balls, but for an average of 17.23. If that sounds underwhelming, if replicated by every batsman it would comfortably clear the T20 average score and, indeed, total 16 runs higher than a team batting at Joe Root’s strike rate. In these figures lie a fundamental truth: T20 is no adjunct to the longer formats. It is a completely different sport.
While Test cricket has always fetishised numbers, the paradox is that the shorter the format the more useful they are. In Test and even one-day international cricket there are relatively few matches, a paucity of useful individual player data and so many variables from game to game that team analysts believe old data on a player becomes redundant after two years. But T20 is ideally suited to data analysis. There are fewer variables from match-to-match – pitches tend to be similar, and match scenarios far more repetitive – and leading players can play 50 T20s a year, providing a proper sample size for data-mining. And, unlike in international cricket, teams in T20 leagues need to be able to quantify a player’s precise worth when assembling their squads.
The use of data is being accelerated by more outside voices, unshackled by cricket’s rigid orthodoxies. They want to keep track of everything in pursuit of a competitive advantage, recognising how far behind baseball T20 remains in its use of numbers. In the coming years that will change. Finally, the sport is gaining proper data on fielding – the runs fielders save, or cost, and the wickets they effect, or squander – which is increasingly influencing team selection. It is also impacting fielding positions; Richard Barker, the analyst for England’s 2016 T20 Blast champions Northamptonshire, foresees that the long stop will return to being a legitimate fielding position, because of modern batsmen’s propensity for ramps and scoops. Data could also salvage one of cricket’s most cherished lost species: the specialist wicketkeeper. Lower-order batsmen face so few balls – the average No7 faces seven balls an innings – that Barker believes picking the best keeper could be prudent.
Some metrics borrowed from baseball will become common, like wins above replacement, measuring a player’s added value compared to an average cricketer in the same position. Barker, a devotee of analytics in American sports, also predicts that boundary slogging percentage – how many balls a batsman needs to hit a four or six – and a variant of baseball’s late-inning pressure situation, rating players on how they perform in clutch situations, could soon become common parlance.
Teams are becoming more assiduous in sizing up the ground dimensions and match-ups in a game and adjusting their team selection accordingly – for instance, picking a bowler specifically to target a star opposition batsman’s vulnerability, notes AR Srikanth, Kolkata Knight Riders’ team analyst. Before Northants’ quarter-final victory over Middlesex last year, Barker compiled a 25-page dossier dissecting all facets of the opposition for the captain and coaches. The ceaseless quest for competitive advantage will take cricket into new terrain. Batsmen playing themselves in is an unaffordable indulgence when four balls equates to more than 3% of the team’s innings. Trent Woodhill, one of the growing breed of specialist T20 coaches at the vanguard of cricket’s new-age thinking, believes that batting cages will soon prepare the next man in. “It’s only superstition dressed up as tradition that’s stopping it,” he says, encapsulating the T20 revolutionaries’ contempt for cricket’s conventional thinking. “A lot of what players do on game day is based on praying to the cricket gods or what they’ve always done rather than actually getting ready for that first ball.”
Men like Woodhill are driving forward change at an almost unfathomable rate. One of the next frontiers will be batsmen using virtual reality headsets. These can neurally prime batsmen’s brains before they face their first ball, explains Cathy Craig, who has been developing VR sets for cricket. The ECB is visiting a demonstration of her equipment in August.
Another new battleground will be teams encouraging playing to use wearable technology to track their precise movements - like pace and agility in the field, how quickly they turn while batting and how much they tire. Ultimately this may culminate in a debate, like in basketball, about how much wearable technology teams can mandate their players to wear.
In T20’s early years, the shortest format’s wider impact on cricket’s ecosystem sometimes seemed more interesting than the game itself. T20 today, a world of ceaseless innovation and conventions being inverted at a dizzying pace, does not need any embellishment.
– The Guardian
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