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".

What's luck got to do with injury?

When a player walks off the field injured, we tend to sympathise. We need to pause to think if he is culpable

Sanjay Manjrekar in Cricinfo

August 4, 2011

Over the last few days MS Dhoni has been fending off questions about his team's fitness about as frequently as some of his young batsmen have had to fend bouncers in England.

I'm certain Dhoni has his own views on fitness, and I would love to hear them one day, for he is one of the fittest men in international cricket, but as captain - well, he has to say the right things, doesn't he? His patent response to questions about injuries to his key players has been that they are unfortunate and there is nothing one can do. I agree with him that injuries are indeed unfortunate, but I hope he does not really mean it when he says there is nothing one can do about them. There is plenty you can do about injuries, and there is a very good, logical explanation for why some cricketers suffer more of them than others.

When a player gets injured, it is often termed unlucky, and he is generally spared criticism, on the assumption that it was beyond the poor cricketer's control. I have seen, during my playing career, cricketers take advantage of this mindset of the fans and media to tackle their insecurities as players: you would often find a short period of poor form quickly followed by an injury absence.

Except in obvious cases, like where fingers are broken while batting or fielding - like with Yuvraj Singh at Trent Bridge - I really think most injuries should be held against players, as you would a poor performance on the field. Injuries too largely happen because of poor performance - off the field. A player who does not forget that he is a top-level international cricketer, even when he is not playing matches, simply does not get injured often.

Kapil Dev, the great Indian allrounder, who I had the privilege of playing with, was one of the fittest Indian cricketers there has been, and there is no better role model of a fit Indian cricketer than him. Was Kapil lucky that he could play 131 Test matches as a fast-medium bowling allrounder, missing only one Test in between, when he was dropped for playing a wild slog at a delicate stage in a match? No, he wasn't. There was a good reason for why he was so durable.

Kapil's greatest asset was that he was an outstanding athlete. Unathletic cricketers tend to suffer more injuries than athletic ones, and there are numerous examples in Indian cricket of fast bowlers who were talented but not good athletes. Should the lack of athleticism of a player not be held against him? Wouldn't the lack of a natural flair for numbers be held against a chartered accountant who keeps bungling up balance sheets?

Kapil was a superb athlete, and admirably, it was an advantage he never took for granted. He may not have given you the impression of being a thinking batsman, but when it came to his bowling, fielding and general approach to fitness, there was no one quite as sharp. He knew his body well and he made sure that he never pushed it beyond a certain limit, but he was also careful to not keep it in cold storage for too long.

During fielding drills, even before matches, Kapil would always throw the ball back to the keeper with real pace, while most fast bowlers I saw, would want to rest their bowling shoulders. Kapil thought different. He made sure his shoulder was always ready and never surprised - in case he had to throw hard for a run-out first ball of a match, for instance. Damage to a body often happens due to such sudden acts, resulting in the player missing games because of an "unfortunate" injury. Mind you, Kapil was not injury-free through his long career, but he planned the rehabilitation well, so he was always ready and raring to go for the next Test. Playing for India meant a lot to him.

Kapil did not let anyone influence him into changing his natural bowling action - though it had the potential threat of creating lower-back problems. He believed that if his body was allowing him to bowl without discomfort, it had to be the right action for him. I wonder, when I watch some of our Indian seamers who keep breaking down, whether they have strayed from their natural actions so much that their bodies have started protesting.

Rest to the body, as we know, is as critical as physical training, for a long, relatively injury-free career, and that is the big challenge for modern-day players: to get time off to rest their tired bodies. But it is also true that a cricketer opting out of an international series is not as big a deal as it used to be; players are usually given their time off without it being held against them. There is always a tour of West Indies or Bangladesh to take a break from, as we have seen.

I saw a couple of Indian players come into the England Test series off a period of relaxation, with chubby faces and bulging midriffs. That's not something you'd ever see with Rahul Dravid. The only international cricket he plays these days is Test cricket, and he often has to come into the team off long periods of "inactivity", but each time he turns up, he looks lean and mean. Dravid is another player with an excellent record of long-term fitness in Indian cricket, and he does not even have great natural athleticism to thank for it. What he has plenty of, though, as we all know, is discipline. He is the perfect example of that cricketer I mentioned earlier, who even when he is not playing reminds himself every day when he wakes up that he is still an active international player, only waiting for his next international assignment.

Players who are willing to make sacrifices, I have found, sustain fewer injuries than others, so the next time we see a cricketer suffer yet another pulled muscle, let's pause for a moment more before saying, "That's unlucky."