The 2019 Cricket World Cup in reverse

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The home favourites prove that they deserve the hype: England started the tournament in dominant fashion. Jason Roy and Bairstow combine to overpower two of their main rivals for the trophy - India and New Zealand. There is a lot of cricket left to play but, with two dangerous teams out the way and a healthy run rate, England are in a good place

Pakistan are the other undefeated team with wins against un-fancied Bangladesh and minnows Afghanistan. Worryingly, they needed every over to chase down Afghanistan and they are likely to struggle when they meet stronger opposition later in the tournament

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The Indian Coin Flip Contest

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MS Dhoni recently forfeited the opportunity to become the most successful captain in the Indian Premier League. Instead, with one throwback, toe-seeking yorker, Lasith Malinga handed the trophy to his own captain, Rohit Sharma of the Mumbai Indians. Four titles in seven years, all at Dhoni’s expense; it is an impressive record… yet Dhoni’s record is arguably superior when we consider the broader extent of his achievements through 12 IPL seasons: Chennai Super Kings have never failed to make the playoffs under his leadership. He has competed in 9 finals. He has taken 44 different players with him to those finals.

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Visuals to break down player performance

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My most valuable tools for understanding player value are my dashboards that allow me to breakdown performance however I need to, quickly and intuitively. This post exists to share a version of those tools, covering a small selection of players

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T20 Match Simulator: under the hood

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When I previously wrote about my new T20 match simulator, I concentrated more on what it could do than how it was built. This time, my aim is to ‘lift the hood’ and explain exactly how the engine is constructed and how it runs. Others can then start to judge for themselves whether it can indeed answer the many, varied questions that I claimed it can

I have tried to keep things simple so that anybody interested can understand how the model works. However, there are times when I use some technical language. If you don’t understand something (and you want to understand it), you can probably find the answer on Wikipedia, a Google search, or in a library

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Sortable Advanced Stats

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There are currently two pages available on this website which contain advanced statistics for batsmen and bowlers, based on the records of my ball-by-ball database, which covers over 1 million deliveries in T20 cricket. Each page houses a table powered by Tableau that allows the user to interact with the data and see which players my system ranks highly

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Simulating T20 Matches: Pinching

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The debate on whether Sunil Narine should open is one of my favourite in T20 cricket. I stand resolutely on team ‘yes’… but standing on team ‘yes’ does not mean that I don’t still have doubt. It wouldn’t be a debate if I didn’t see merit to arguments on both sides. I have built a simulator that will play out T20 games ball-by-ball, thousands of times, so that we can see the impact of playing in a certain way, or with a certain line-up. This means that we can set up a game between the Kolkata Knight Riders and the Sunrisers Hyderabad (say) and simulate what would happen with Narine at different spots in the line-up

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Trialling a T20 Captaincy Metric

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The importance of captaincy in cricket is greater than in almost any other sport. In football, for just one example, the captain has almost no influence whatsoever over team selection or strategy. This is not true in cricket. Not only are cricket captains involved in most strategic and tactical decision-making, this also comes with more responsibility for the other players in the team, their mindset and their morale. Measuring the value of a good captain is incredibly difficult

One aspect of captaincy that might be measurable is the decisions that they make on the field. Here, the decision-making is observable by an outsider. Obvious, even, in the case of bowling changes. They occur 20 times in an innings and at regular intervals

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Captain Typical

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My current project is a ball-by-ball simulator for T20 matches. This post isn't about that. It is about one tiny component which took way too much time to build considering how little value it contributes to the endeavour of predicting T20 outcomes. I wanted my simulator to have the ability to simulate what bowling changes the captain would make during an innings. And so I built a model to pick the next bowler

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Pinching in an IPL Final

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It's rare to witness an innings that exhibits such a clear structure. Shane Watson's century in the IPL Final against Sunrisers Hyderabad was an extraordinary innings. He failed to score from the first 10 deliveries yet finished with a 205 strike rate. To some extent, the game-plan looked ingenious because Watson was able to execute so perfectly, but it was remarkable to see him so deliberate in deciding which overs to attack

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Reflection on the IPL

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I didn't post any articles on this site during the IPL season. That is entirely because I was contracted with RCB. To me, it seems like an eternity since I visited my own blog but, in reality, only two months has past. This post comprises a quick reflection on the season and what I learned in those two months travelling the IPL with RCB... hopefully some people find it interesting

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Where should you play your best batsman?

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Rohit Sharma is the captain and assumed best batsman of the Mumbai Indians. He seems likely to bat at number 3 or 4 this season, unchanged from last year, when Buttler and Patel were generally preferred as the opening pair. Whilst those two are now gone, Mumbai did acquire another well-established opener at auction in the form of Evin Lewis, Ishan Kishan may also get the chance to impress

Last year, Sharma suggested that “probably three, four is the best position” for him but the stats emphatically disagree. In 52 matches as an opener, he averages 39.5 runs at a strike rate of 142. Both numbers drop noticeably when he arrives between 4-6, falling to an average of 32.4 runs at 132 (in 130 matches)

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Toss decisions: it's complicated

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Recently, I wrote about how the toss-decisions made by captains before games were probably sub-optimal. I stand by everything said within that article (which concluded with me claiming that I would have a better record than the average T20 captain were I the one making decisions) but there were complications that I chose not include. This post exists to demonstrate that interpreting even the simplest data is often far from straightforward - and the capacity to confuse cause and effect is always present

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Toss decisions: worse than random

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Being at home in the IPL gives the team a 1% advantage. Batting second gives the team a 5% advantage. And winning the toss gives the team a 2% advantage. That may all seem to conform to common sense but a closer examination of those figures reveals an inconsistency: how can winning the toss possibly be less advantageous than batting second?

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