I is the most important letter in a cricket team

By Girish Menon

In a recent article in The Telegraph, Geoffrey Boycott mentioned, there is no I in a cricket team and hence implying that Kevin Pietersen should kowtow to the diktats of the team's leaders. In this piece I will argue that I believe the individual, I, is the elephant in a cricket team's dressing room and by ignoring it won't we be behaving like an ostrich burying its head in the sand?

In cricket there are three principal activities viz. batting, bowling and fielding and in each activity the individual player is the most important actor. Let me try to explain this idea by contrasting it with football. In football, a defender can ask for help from another teammate to police and control a forward from the opposite team. Other players can pass the ball, run into open spaces etc to help a team mate come out of a sticky situation. The goalkeeper appears to be the only individual in this team sport.

In cricket, while batting no team mate can help a batter combat the aggression of a Morkel or the wiles of a Murali. The individual has to face the ball delivered by a bowler. A team mate may take a single of the last ball of each over and shield his partner, but there is no way he can face the ball for his partner should he find himself at the receiving end. In contrast, defenders in football can act in pairs to ward of an  attack by an opposing forward.

It gets even more individual when it gets to bowling. The bowler has to run up and deliver the ball on his own accord. The rest of his teammates enter the game only subsequently after the batter has reacted to the delivery. In football, a forward can pass the ball to a team mate thereby beating the goalkeeper and creating an open goal situation for his teammate to score.

Similarly whilst fielding too it is the individual who is responsible for delivering the goods and any discussion of individualism in cricket will not be complete without a discussion of the role of the most important individual in a cricket team viz. the captain. The captain's individual idiosyncrasies affect not only the fortune of the team but also the careers of the other team members in the squad.

In the book, One More Over, Erapalli Prasanna talked about how under Bishen Bedi's captaincy he was brought on to bowl only after the batsmen were well established at the crease. I'm sure that cricket watchers and players will have innumerable stories about the decisions of captains that have affected a game as well as individual careers.

In a recent article Ed Smith talked about TheBresnan Effect on the English team's outcomes in recent cricket matches due to the inclusion of Tim Bresnan in the team. While admitting the difficulty of measuring Bresnan's impact on England or more famously that of Shane Battier on the Houston Rockets; Smith implicitly recognises the individual's role in the fortunes of a team. My thesis therefore is that the absence of an adequate tool to evaluate an individual's performance should not therefore lead us to conclude erroneously like Boycott that there is no 'I' in a cricket team.

After all if there is no 'I' in a cricket team; then why are some individuals from a losing team retained while the less fortunate ones dropped. If there is collective responsibility then like the voting out of a political party all members of a cricket team should be dropped in case of failure. Since that does not happen it would be  foolish for anybody, and especially Boycott, to argue against individualism in cricket.

The Bresnan effect

What makes some players talismans, in whose presence their teams play better than they would otherwise?

Ed Smith in Cricinfo

June 6, 2012

Are some players lucky charms? Or do we use luck as lazy short-hand slang to avoid the effort of identifying the set of skills that really sets them apart?

Tim Bresnan, England's bowling allrounder, now has a remarkable record in Test matches: played 13, won 13. So Bresnan will begin his 14th Test match this week yet to feel the pain of defeat in a white England jersey. Is that luck or skill?

Bresnan's role in those 13 consecutive victories has been mostly unflashy. Indeed, for many of those 13 selections, his place in the XI has been the most in jeopardy: the other ten players were picked first, with Bresnan battling it out for the final place. So far, the selectors have been proved right every time.

The unheralded rise of this understated Yorkshireman reminds me of "The No-Stats All-Star", a brilliant New York Times article by the American writer Michael Lewis. Fans of Lewis' iconic book Moneyball should read it immediately. Lewis' starting point is trying to understand how some players have an effect on a team that is not captured in their own statistical performance.

Lewis' subject is Shane Battier, a defensive player for the Houston Rockets. Battier seems to have the ability to make a team win, and yet no one knows quite how he does it. Battier's job is to guard the most talented opponents, shutting down attacking geniuses such as Kobe Bryant. So you would expect Battier to have poor numbers as a shooter and dribbler. Much more interestingly, he doesn't even have outstanding stats using the standard defensive metric of rebounds. Nor is Battier universally highly rated by his peers.

Lewis describes the situation as a basketball mystery. "A player is widely regarded inside the NBA as, at best, a replaceable cog in a machine driven by superstars. And yet every team he has ever played on has acquired some magical ability to win." How quickly we fall back on irrational terminology: the "magic Battier" or the "lucky charm Bresnan". In fact, Lewis goes on to deconstruct the magic in the most logical terms:

"Battier's game is a weird combination of obvious weaknesses and nearly invisible strengths. When he is on the court, his team-mates get better, often a lot better, and his opponents get worse - often a lot worse. He may not grab huge numbers of rebounds, but he has an uncanny ability to improve his team-mates' rebounding. He doesn't shoot much, but when he does, he takes only the most efficient shots. He also has a knack for getting the ball to team-mates who are in a position to do the same, and he commits few turnovers."

One of the coaches at the Rockets calls Battier "lego" because "when he's on the court, all the pieces start to fit together". It is a standard misconception that team selection is about picking the best all-round players and only the best players. In fact, the art of selection is picking the right team, which is an organic entity with its own unique personality. The Houston Rockets are committed to analysing how the five players on any basketball team are far more than the sum of their parts. As Lewis puts it: "The Rockets devote a lot of energy to untangling subtle interactions among the team's elements."

The Rockets' coaches use a statistic called the "plus-minus", which measures what happens to the score when any given player is on the court. There are risks with over-reliance on the plus-minus, of course. In football, the very best players are often rested for easy games - so they miss on easy "pluses". And the plus-minus flatters players who are dragged up by brilliance that surrounds them. A basketball player who finds himself on the same team with the world's four best players, and who plays only when they do, will benefit from an artificially inflated plus-minus.

Analysts need to watch out for these potential pitfalls. But the brilliance of the plus-minus, unlike other statistical measures, is that it asks absolutely the right question - how much does a player really help the team? In basketball, a good player might be a plus three -- that is, his team averages three points more per game than its opponent when he is on the floor. Shane Battier is plus six.

	It is a standard misconception that team selection is about picking the best all-round players and only the best players. In fact, the art of selection is picking the right team, which is an organic entity with its own unique personality

There are Battiers in every sport. Arsenal fans will tell you how what a huge difference Mikel Arteta made to their efficiency and effectiveness last season. Arteta does not possess explosive pace or power. Nor does he quite have the ability to play the thrilling eye-catching pass that made his predecessor Cesc Fabregas so exciting to watch. But when Arteta is on the pitch, Arsenal possess shape, structure and - above all - common sense and leadership. Arteta brings class and poise to a team that has often lacked maturity. In the same vein, Chelsea fans can talk into the early hours about how Claude Makelele - the defensive midfielder who masterminded their glory days in the mid-2000s - is the most underrated player in Premiership history.

There are also inverse-Battiers: players who rack up good personal stats while actually damaging the team's win-loss percentage. Every cricketer has personal experience of selfish batsmen in one-day cricket who tend to score their runs when it is easy, and take up more balls than they should while they're doing so. The saddest thing about selfish players is how often weak coaches let them get away with it to the detriment of the team.

In some respects, Bresnan (for the time being, anyway) is not the ideal cricketing example of the Battier phenomenon - because after a stellar personal best at Trent Bridge last month, Bresnan is currently sitting on a very tidy set of personal statistics.

But for much of his career to date, Bresnan's contribution to the team has not been so easy to observe in the old-fashioned statistical measures. Fortunately, England employ the perfect man to explore how the value of some players is observed best in the win-loss column. Nathan Leamon, a former maths teacher and another unsung hero of the England set-up, spends his time developing new statistical tools to explain how cricket matches are won.

I doubt Bresnan is especially interested in obscure statistical analysis. But if his career continues on its current trajectory, he might end up as the accidental standard bearer for a more enlightened approach to selecting teams. How appropriate it would be if a new number - the plus-minus column - was added to every player's personal statistics. Perhaps the cricketing incarnation of the plus-minus metric should be given a special nickname: "the Bresnan".

Predicting how a player is going to perform has always been a tricky business

Who'd have thunk it?

Ed Smith

April 25, 2012

Did you pick them first time? Did you recognise how good they were at first glance? Or did you conveniently revise your opinion much later, when the results started to come in? 

I've been asking myself that question as I've followed the career of Vernon Philander. He now has 51 wickets in just seven Tests. Only the Australian seamer CBT Turner, who reached the milestone in 1888, has reached 50 wickets faster than South Africa's new bowling sensation. I don't mean any disrespect to the legends of the past, but I think it's safe to say that Test cricket has moved on a bit since the days of Turner. So Philander has had statistically the best start to any Test bowling career in modern history.

Who saw that coming? I can claim only half-prescience, and I sadly lacked the courage to go on the record. I first encountered Philander when I was captain of Middlesex in 2008 and he joined the club as our overseas pro. I didn't know much about him beyond what I'd been told - "Allrounder, hard-hitting batter, maybe a bit more of a bowler." Armed with no more information than that, I found myself batting in the nets against our new signing just a couple of minutes after I'd met him.

After the usual pleasantries, it was down to the serious business of Philander bowling at me on a green net surface with a new ball in his hand. So what did I think? Honestly? I thought: "Hmm, I thought they said he was a 'useful allrounder'? Looks more like a genuine opening bowler to me. But I'd better keep it to myself - maybe I've just lost it a bit?"

Philander was just as impressive in matches as he was in the nets. He quickly went from bowling first-change to opening the bowling, then to being our strike bowler. Was he just having a great run of form or was he always this good? Looking back on it, I wish I'd said to everyone - "Forget the fact he can also bat, this bloke is a serious bowler."

When we form judgments of players, we tend to be conditioned by the labels that are already attached to them - "bowling allrounder", "wicketkeeper-batsman", "promising youngster". Once a player has been put in the wrong box, our opinions tend to be conditioned by what everyone else has said. We are clouded by the conventional wisdom that surrounds us.

Look at Andrew Flintoff. It took years for everyone to realise that he was one of the best fast bowlers in the world in the mid-2000s. That was partly because we were distracted by his swashbuckling batting. We were so busy judging him as an allrounder that we failed to notice that he was holding his own against the best in the world, purely as a bowler.

When I played against Matt Prior in his early days at Sussex I thought he was among their best batsmen. The fact that he also kept wicket led him to be underrated as a pure batsman. He could completely change a game in one session and was the often the player I was most happy to see dismissed.

The dressing room is often too slow to acknowledge that a young player is already a serious performer. It cuts against the overstated notion of "He's still got a lot to learn." I have a strange sense of satisfaction at having helped propel the then little-known fast bowler Graham Onions into the England team. Other players weren't convinced he was the genuine article. But he knocked me over so often in 2006 that I had no choice but to become his greatest advocate. I haven't changed my mind: when he is fit, he is one of the best bowlers around.

I played against Tim Bresnan in one of his first matches for Yorkshire. He thudded a short ball into my chest in his first over. "Can't believe that hurt," one of my team-mates scoffed, "it was only bowled by that debutant bloke." True enough. But every top player has to start out as a debutant.

	The dressing room is often too slow to acknowledge that a young player is already a serious performer. It cuts against the overstated notion of "He's still got a lot to learn"

The gravest errors of judgement, of course, make for the really good stories. When Aravinda de Silva played for Kent in 1995, he brought along a young Sri Lankan to have a bowl in the nets at Canterbury. What did the Kent players think of the young lad, Aravinda wondered? The general view was that he was promising but not worth a contract.

It was Muttiah Muralitharan.

Sometimes, of course, everyone fails to predict the trajectory of a career. Earlier this month, Alan Richardson was named one of the Wisden cricketers of the year. That is exalted company to keep: Kumar Sangakkara and Alastair Cook were among the other winners.

Richardson is a 36-year-old county professional who has played for Derbyshire, Warwickshire, Middlesex and now Worcestershire. For much of his career, Richardson has had to fight for every game he has played. He started out as a trialist, travelling around the country looking for 2nd team opportunities. It wasn't until he turned 30 that he became an automatic selection in first-class cricket.

Richardson was a captain's dream at Middlesex: honest, loyal, honourable, hard-working and warm-hearted. By their early 30s, most seamers are in decline and have to suffer the indignity of watching batsmen they once bullied smash them around the ground. Not Richardson. Aged 34, he taught himself the away-swinger - typical of his relentless hunger for self-improvement. In 2011, Richardson clocked up more first-class wickets than anyone.

About to turn 37, he says his chances of playing for England have gone. I hope he's wrong. No one could more richly deserve the right to play for his country. Watching Richardson pull on an England cap would be one of the finest sights in cricket - the perfect example of character rewarded. And it would be further proof that some cricketers will always be quiet achievers, inching towards excellence without vanity or fanfare. They deserve the limelight more than anyone.

Former England, Kent and Middlesex batsman Ed Smith's new book, Luck - What It Means and Why It Matters, is out now.