Data is not the enemy

Ed Smith in Cricinfo

Taking the stats at your disposal into account does not mean your players cannot play a fearless and instinctive brand of cricket


The information is available to the players. It's their choice whether to use it or not © AFP



Poor Peter Moores couldn't have chosen a sentence more likely to turn him into a human dartboard. He needed to "look at the match data," Moores said after England's disastrous defeat to Bangladesh. To a press corps increasingly convinced that the England team has become formulaic and nerdy, this was the worst answer Moores could have reeled off.

It did, however, open up a whole new range of possibilities for the post-match interview. One wondered how historic sports interviews might have been different in the age of referencing match data.

Interviewer to George Foreman after he lost to Muhammad Ali in 1974: "What did you make of the fight, George?"

Foreman: "Haven't seen the fight data yet."

Interviewer: "Well, two men were standing up at the start of the eighth. Then there was one. You were on the canvas. In an algorithm: 2; 8; 1."

Foreman: "Right, got it."

And how would a data-inspired interview have run after the 1978 Oxford-Cambridge boat race, when Cambridge sank into the Thames, live on television?

Interviewer to Cambridge captain: "Disappointing race out there, I imagine?"

Captain: "Impossible to say before seeing the race data."

Interviewer: "Glug, glug, glug - ring any bells?"

All this mischief, however, does not explain very much why England crashed out of the World Cup. Are we really to believe that the central figure in the catastrophe was Nathan Leamon, the mathematician and former schoolteacher who is now England's stats analyst? That is ridiculous. It is Leamon's job to supply evidence that may help the management to make better decisions. It is the job of the coaching staff to use that information appropriately. So even if you believe, as I do, that England need to play a more fearless, instinctive brand of cricket, it does not follow that having access to potentially useful data prevents you from doing so.

The real problem is not maths, which by definition is flinty, pitiless, robust and unsentimental. No, the problem is management-speak, learned jargon and corporate-style snake oil. The unfortunate thing is that coaches can now use the phrase "match data" as just another thing to say when they are avoiding the subject. It slots into the lexicon of cliché, alongside "taking the positives", "skill sets" and "plan execution".

The irony is that real maths, in fact, is at the opposite end of the spectrum from jargon. Maths is exclusively content; jargon is content-free.

In his 1946 essay "Politics and the English Language", George Orwell despaired of political jargon: "As soon as certain topics are raised, the concrete melts into the abstract and no one seems able to think of turns of words that are not hackneyed: prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house." Sport soon surpassed politics for meaningless waffle. Orwell deserves a new epitaph: "The man who foresaw the evolution of the post-match interview."

The former England captain Mike Atherton made several good points about the rush to blame data for all England's woes. First, analytics now has less influence over the team than it did in the more successful Flower-Strauss era. Secondly, Leamon's work is not pushed down players' throats. Stats for the particular ground, videos of an opposition bowler's range of slower balls, these things are available if players want to see them. If they don't, fine.



Nathan Leamon has a gift for numbers but he doesn't believe they provide all the answers © PA Photos

In 2006, while I was writing my book What Sport Tells Us About Life, I dedicated a whole chapter to the remarkable success of a school rugby team, unbeaten for three seasons, a sequence of 33 games. From the author's perspective, drawing lessons from a school coach was an unusual and risky approach. After all, other subjects of my book included Zinedine Zidane, Billy Beane and Michael Jordan. What was a school coach doing in that company?

The answer is that I thought his methodology was worth bringing to a wider audience. The coach was a plain-speaking, no-nonsense Lancastrian who pared down his comments to players. Rather than talking for talking's sake - as most coaches do - he researched what really happened in the matches and fed back small chunks of highly useful information. The quest was to find insight, concision and meaning; and to avoid noise, chatter and cliché.

Who was this progressive but unheard-of coach? Nathan Leamon. His approach, then and now, is thoughtful, flexible and open. His character is modest without being deferential, self-contained without being standoffish. Now, nine years on, he must find the way he is portrayed in the media as unrecognisable. Far from being a credulous geek, Leamon is an understated sceptic, a sensible and balanced man who happens to have a gift for numbers. Leamon is the last person to argue that data can provide all the answers - he's much too smart.

While England were exiting the World Cup, the retired NBA player Shane Battier was addressing a sold-out audience at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference in Boston. If you want to understand how data can help a sportsman perform better, read Michael Lewis on Battier's playing days.

Or this, exploring why it is so hard, with the naked eye, to understand the way that Mesut Özil, the Arsenal footballer, creates space on a football pitch.

Like it or not, as professional sport evolves it will provide greater scope for academic rigour. A lot of clever people like sport and they are constantly developing ideas - some good, others less good - that may eventually become absorbed into the mainstream. Bill James' understanding of data changed baseball forever. Eventually no coach could afford to ignore James' ideas because it would cost them games.

That is why the status of the sports analyst is going up. Nate Silver, who has become the most important analyst of American presidential elections, cut his teeth modelling sports matches. Ideas that originate in sport are finding wider application in the outside world.

And yet I am equally confident that a central task for sports coaches - now more than ever - is to liberate players, to free them from stifling anxiety and fearfulness.

Those two truths exist in parallel, not in conflict. Coaches will inevitably want to use every tool at their disposal, including relevant data. Then they must have the psychological nous, the feel and the common touch, to allow players to express themselves.



In the future of limited-overs cricket, can batsmen build dominant positions early enough to reduce the risk of getting out so much as to take it out of the equation? size: 900 © Getty Images

In the end, the discussion of data in sport tends to reveal more about prejudices than the underlying reality. It's all too easy to blame other people for using either too much or too little evidence en route to their decisions. I am intuitive, you are strangely convinced, he is delusional. Or, if you prefer, I am rational, you are a reductionist, he is a slave to numbers.

There is another story to emerge from this World Cup. The central innovation, which has now transferred from T20 to ODIs, is that talented batsmen are lethal - perhaps unstoppable - when they play without any fear of getting out. In 2003 I played in the first ever T20 league. I wrote at the time that it allowed players to play as they do in the nets, when they are totally uninhibited.

This powerful freedom, however, is partly earned by the match situation, especially in the middle overs. If the batting team is behind in the match, and there are few wickets in hand, it is far harder to bat as though another wicket wouldn't matter. The challenge now, in all white-ball cricket, is to build a position so dominant that there is no risk attached to getting out. If you are batting at 360 for 2 with seven overs left - with, say, Glenn Maxwell padded up and waiting - there is literally no risk in trying to hit a six and getting out. Paradoxically, of course, that makes you more likely to hit the ball for six!

Perhaps someone can show me the data on how quickly this underlying dominance turns into an impregnable lead. If I was coach, I'd certainly want to know.

Why do we take economists so seriously?

They have no foresight, no hindsight, and little humanity. Are they really the best people to lead us out of this crisis?

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• guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 6 June 2012 20.02 BST

The unemployed people bussed in to work as stewards at the jubilee – a sign of the scale of inequality in the west? Photograph: Shiv Malik for the Guardian

It's the economists, stupid! While we were not waving but drowning in soggy flags, economic stuff was happening. Big stuff, though it could not break through the gooey queen-fest. In the news blackout that was the jubilee, other countries were reporting the meltdown of the Spanish banks, and thus, eventually, the euro. Obama was on the phone to Cameron telling him to do something about Merkel. It's all pretty dire. It must be for me to understand it, for though I am not an economist, I know what I like. Some sort of stimulus, please. Fiscal will do nicely.

Actually, that may happen. Another £50bn could be pumped into the economy soon. Money does not grow on trees, you know. Except when it is called quantitative easing.

Why all this panic, though? Aren't economists in charge of it all? Yes. And this is the problem. These highly skilled people carry on, though they exhibit not only a lack of foresight but an astonishing lack of hindsight. Why on earth are they taken seriously when they keep getting things wrong? We are silenced by some jargon and bogus maths (sorry, probabilities) because we are mostly innumerate and because economic orthodoxy presents itself as a higher faith. I am not the only person uncertain as to what a trillion means, surely? It was explained to me in terms of time. A million is a few seconds, a trillion is 30 years – it's a lot of wonga.

The sudden ability to produce money out of thin air is exactly why economists such as Paul Krugman tell us that the Thatcher-lite hausfrau-speak of Osborne is senseless. The deficit is not like household debt, because if it was, I could go mad in Morrisons, go to the till promising to pay later and they would still give me cashback.

But we are indeed in reduced circumstances when debate is reduced to bankers arguing with economists. This clash of ideologies is not really left versus right. It is more akin to fundamentalists talking to agnostics. To be an austerity groupie, one has to ignore the actual behaviour of people; to believe fervently in Keynes, one has to ignore the behaviour of politicians.

Economics is not a science; it's not even a social science. It is an antisocial theory. It assumes behaviour is rational. It cannot calculate for contradiction, culture, altruism, fear, greed, love or humanity at all.

Sure, there are some new radicals on the block who daringly suggest that we should not adhere to the old models. We end up then with these money wizards shouting at each other on Newsnight while novelists such as John Lanchester translate for us. Only non-economists properly explain that money is not real and what was traded during the boom years were not real things, not even real futures, but guesstimates of futures bundled into some bizarre equation where no one at the top could lose. Gamblers always made money, but it became possible to make money without risking your own. It was risk, not wealth, that trickled down, so those without jobs could buy houses soon to be repossessed.

Risk-free capitalism was what the anti-globalisers always warned us about, but they had dreadlocks and dogs on string and were pepper-sprayed away. What they misjudged was how quickly developed countries would come to look like underdeveloped ones: the scale of inequality in "the west". In the US there are the incredibly wealthy and then those who sleep in the woods on the edge of broken cities; here, the unemployed are bussed in to "steward" the celebration of the billionaire monarch.

This is economic sense as it is practised by the deliberately dumb, those who bow down before the calculation that we can have even Spanish levels of youth unemployment (40%-50%) if it reduces the deficit by the next election. Meanwhile, if you have a job, do save up for your pension, because they have gone down the pan.

Some of the free-market economists are right, but politicians can't go there. The free movement of capital really requires the free movement of labour. Go where the jobs are, but do not complain when immigration undercuts your wage.

Do not complain either when economists and government ministers tell you that what you thought had a social purpose must now be profit-driven. Money must be made from schools, hospitals and looking after the elderly. The privatisation of care is one of the only growth industries. This is what you get from this dictatorship of economists, and it should be overthrown. It is wrong and keeps being wrong. The choices to be made now are moral, not economic ones. Only an idiot or an economist would think otherwise.