What's so wrong with negative fields anyway?

When England set cautious fields they are called tactically naïve; but they win

Ed Smith

July 4, 2012

A month ago, I had one of the most interesting conversations I've ever had about sport. It was in a tiny restaurant in Paris with the brilliant football writer Simon Kuper. The subject was how Spain became the world's dominant football culture.

Spain have now won Euro 2008, the 2010 World Cup and Euro 2012. They are also currently world champions at Under-19 and U-17 levels. The Spanish way - high skill, brilliant passing, and little focus on physical size or brutality - has mastered the world. Not only are Spain serial winners, they have also set football's philosophical agenda.

Our conversation in Paris began with football, but I realised afterwards that the question applied to all sports. How do games evolve? Can original thinkers change their sports forever? Is intelligence - or better still, insight - the most underused resource in sport? Can you think your way to success?

Kuper explained to me that the origins of modern football began with a single inspired insight by the superb Dutch player and coach Johan Cruyff. Like many great ideas it sounds obvious but it is actually profound. The pass, that is what really matters in football. The precision, the perfection of the pass. Everything else - the arm-waving, the brave running around, the passionate sweat and tears - is peripheral. Being better at passing is what wins football matches.

Prompted by Cruyff, Barcelona set up La Masia academy to educate players about the pass. When you watch Spain mesmerise opponents, you are watching an idea brought to life. There is a bloodline that runs from Cruyff - via Pep Guardiola - to Xavi, Iniesta and Fàbregas, the champions of Europe, champions of the world. One idea changed the game forever. Spanish dominance is not just based on skill. It is founded on brains.

Yet the most interesting part of the story is the resistance to Spain's success, the refusal to follow the logic that has created it. Throughout Euro 2012, English pundits continued to accuse Spain of being "boring". The English old guard even condemned Spain's selection and tactics. How risk-averse, how stupid of Spain not to play a centre forward at all? Well, Spain won the final 4-0, without playing a centre forward for much of the game. Their first goal was brilliantly set up by Fàbregas, a midfielder picked instead of a regular centre forward. Stupid Spain, boring Spain? Behind the insult, observe the anger. When a pack of conventional thinkers are confused, they lash out at what they don't understand.

We see the same criticisms thrown around in cricket, the same reluctance to accept that new thinking might lead to better results. Here is an example. Pundits often ridicule captains for setting "negative" fields. The assumption is that it is always a "positive" move (i.e. that it will lead to more wickets) to have more slips and fewer fielders saving the single.

But what is positive, what is negative?

When I was a player, I often liked batting against very "positive" fields. Because I liked to bat at a reasonable tempo, feeling that the scoreboard was ticking along. Many players have a natural tempo, a pace of scoring that makes them feel they are in control. In a perfect world, of course, batsmen should be able to defend for hours without worrying about the scoring rate. But most batsmen are human beings.

	I would much rather bat against an egotistical captain trying to impress the crowd than an unobtrusive captain trying to stop me batting in the way that suited me

That's why I often found it easier to score runs against flashy, "positive" captains, who were always trying to set eye-catching "aggressive" fields. While they were arranging catchers in apparently original groupings, runs flowed from the bat. I would much rather bat against an egotistical captain trying to impress the crowd than an unobtrusive captain trying to stop me batting in the way that suited me.

Now I've retired, I can reveal an effective and underused tactic: stop people scoring (whatever the type of match) and you'll probably get them out. This has become even more relevant to Test cricket during the era of T20 cricket. Batsmen have become increasingly used to hitting boundaries in Test cricket because T20 has changed the way people feel about their natural scoring rate. That's why Andrew Strauss is unafraid to have more fielders saving one and fewer catchers in Test cricket.

When England set cautious fields, they too are called "tactically naïve". And they win. When Spain don't play a centre forward, they are called boring and tactically naïve. And they win.

It is time to revisit some definitions. What are tactics but tools for winning sports matches? And since when was it naïve to play to your strengths?

A case study of thinking and winning is the story of the Oakland Athletics in baseball. Thanks to the book, and now film, Moneyball, it is has become one of the famous stories in sport. As with Cruyff's insight about the pass, the over-performance of the Oakland A's began with a single insight. The best way to approach winning a baseball match is not thinking about scoring runs. It is to focus on getting on base. A run is usually the by-product of getting on base. Runs are hard to predict; getting on base is much easier to assess and calculate. So the Athletics focused on the tractable, controllable parts of the match, ignoring the headline-grabbing end-product.

In 2002 the Athletics unveiled their new strategy. Guess what: the pack of baseball pundits and insiders didn't like it. They accused the Athletics of wrong-headedness, hubris and over-intellectualism. Undeterred, Oakland won a record 103 matches out of 162.

Conventional wisdom moves at a glacial pace because people become attached to ideas that are no longer relevant. Military historians say that generals are always preparing to fight the war that has just ended. So it is in sport.

Boring Spain, naïve England, wrong-headed Oakland? I prefer the idea that sport is always evolving, with new ideas driving the pace of change.

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

Risk models must be torn up, says Bank of England's Haldane

Financial risk models that underpin market behaviour, economic theory and bank regulation dangerously underestimate the threat to taxpayers and must be completely redrawn to prevent a repeat of the financial crisis, a leading policymaker has warned.
 

The Bank of England's Andrew Haldane has called for economists to re-think what they mean by "normal" 

 

By Philip Aldrick, Economics Editor

11:46AM BST 08 Jun 2012

57 Comments

 

Andrew Haldane, executive director for financial stability at the Bank of England, said the crisis provided compelling proof that “catastrophe risk” has been totally mis-priced. “That was a key fault-line during the crisis and, as recent experience attests, remains a key fault-line today,” he said in a paper at the University of Edinburgh Business School.

If taxpayers are to be protected in future, financial regulators must put “in place robust fail-safes to stop chaos emerging”, such as UK plans to ringfence banks’ retail operations or US proposals to ban casino-like proprietary trading.

Such “structural safeguards on worst-case outcomes” need to be accompanied by a massive increase in the “array of financial data available to regulators” provided by banks, he added. The extra information would allow regulators to build a “systemic risk map” not unlike a weather forecast that could “provide early warnings to enable defensive actions to be taken”.

“In a complex, uncertain environment, the only fail-safe way of protecting against systemic collapse is to act on the structure of the overall system, rather than the behaviour of each individual within it,” he said. “Until then, normal service is unlikely to resume.”

In a wide-ranging piece of research that sourced evidence not just from economics but from physics, biology and even behaviour on Twitter, Mr Haldane argued that the orthodox models used to measure risk overstate “normality” and underestimate the costs and probability of “catastrophe”.

To make the financial system safer, they need to be torn up, he said in the paper, co-authored with Bank economist Benjamin Nelson.

“The economics profession has for much of the 20th century been bewitched by normality. Real business cycle theory in economics and efficient markets theory in finance bear the tell-tale signs of this intellectual infatuation,” he said. “Over the past five years, the real world has behaved in ways which make a monkey of these theories.”

Changing the dangerous consensus “will require a fairly fundamental re-think of the foundations of modern-day economics, finance and econometrics”, Mr Haldane added.

Popular models that underpin banks’ risk management, such as Value-at-Risk (VaR), Black-Scholes and Vasicek, underprepare directors and regulators for a “fat tail”, or catastrophe event.

Citing studies of actuarial models used in insurance, Mr Haldane said “fat tails... would be expected to occur approximately once every 800 years for GDP and once every 64 years for equities”. “In reality, for GDP it appears to occur roughly once every century, for equities once every eight years.”

Regulatory risk measurements using the Vasicek model underestimate capital requirements by between 20pc and 85pc compared with a proper analysis of the past three centuries, he added. He cited JP Morgan’s recent $2bn trading loss as an example of the failure of VaR.

Changing the accepted wisdom on how to calculate risk is more important now than ever before, he added. “As the world becomes increasingly integrated – financially, economically, socially – interactions among the moving parts may make for potentially fatter tails. Catastrophe risk may be on the rise."

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.