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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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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IPL Auction 2018 - RTMs

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The IPL auction has been described as unfair, humiliating, and voyeuristic*. But most critics would still admit that, for the emotionally detached observer, it is flipping entertaining. There are so many factors to unravel that influence prices and teams battle an armada of seductive cognitive biases. For a data lover like myself, it provides a brand-new dataset that indicates how cricket insiders might think

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IPL Retentions 2018

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So many thoughts on the latest retention decisions. Unreasonably excited to see what happens next at the auction on January 27/28. Analysing and reacting to the economics and business strategies used in a sports leagues can sometimes be more fun than the action itself!

My aim here is merely to make sense of the retentions that have just happened. For the most part, you can generally see what the teams were thinking. There seem to be three different types of influence on the decisions that each team made: the commercial influences that help teams to make money, the financial influences that help teams to save costs, and the on-filed influences that help teams to win titles

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Gulf in the BPL

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I’m not the first person to notice the imbalance between overseas and domestic players in the BPL. With the tournament almost over, the chasm has, predictably, remained between the overseas and domestic players. The overseas players are far more productive than their Bangladeshi equivalents.

Interestingly, the overseas batsmen are consistent against both overseas and domestic bowling. In contrast, the overseas bowlers prey disproportionately on the domestic players to exhibit their superiority

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Optimising the first over

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Six games into the 2017 T20 Blast, Kent were the slowest starters in the competition. Even enduring a maiden first over at home to Gloucestershire. In their seventh game, against Somerset, the team switched things up. Joe Denly moved into the opening slot, with his partner, Bell-Drummond replacing him at the other end

Superficially, the switch appeared to work. In the following eight games, Kent were scoring more runs after 3 balls (+0.6), more runs in the first over (+0.5), and more runs in the PowerPlay (+2.6)

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First-over specialists

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Tim Wigmore @timwig recently wrote a piece on players specialised in the "art of the first over"... the surprisingly common phenomenon of otherwise part-time bowlers being called on to open the innings for the bowling team. In this post I want to delve a bit deeper into the numbers themselves and apply an analytical lens to establish what these numbers tell us

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