What matters: leadership, data analysis, culture

Three factors that can play an important role in a team's success

Ed Smith

May 15, 2013

 

	Rajasthan Royals are an example of a cricket team that underspends and overachieves © BCCI  Enlarge
Related Links Ed Smith : It's not about selection or tactics, silly

A writer yearns to have intelligent readers who engage with his ideas. Then you realise that they are examining your logic with an uncomfortably forensic eye.

Two weeks ago I argued that all students of sport need to understand randomness. That the familiar talking points of selection and tactics are lazily thrown around to explain events they often do not influence. That understanding the "causes" of why things happen in sport is very difficult.

Enter Kieran McMaster, a statistician and ESPNcricinfo reader. He asks how I can explain the evolution of the Spain football team and the All Blacks rugby squad, teams that not only win but also drive forward the evolution of their sport. Surely that is evidence of tactical supremacy? Moreover, his question gained added weight thanks to a random external event: the retirement of Sir Alex Ferguson. How can I square my scepticism about the short-term influence of tactics and selection with the consistent and relentless success of Sir Alex, who manipulated the levers of management so shrewdly?

Here goes.

I certainly do believe in leadership. It is obviously true that some captains and coaches make a sustained difference. Warren Gatland has transformed the Welsh rugby team from romantic underachievers to pragmatic winners. Jose Mourinho wins something wherever he goes. The pattern of success is too consistent to be explained by randomness. One out of one might be dumb luck. But it is much more likely to be skill than luck if a coach has a long sequence of different winning teams.

It is equally true that there aren't many coaches and captains in this elite category, certainly fewer than there are teams that need managers. Great coaches are incredibly rare. So clubs that continually chop and change managers, searching for the right "chemistry" (usually a euphemism) are usually taking an ill-judged risk. It is a statistical fact that changing the manager, on average, makes no difference at all to the performance of the team. It is, however, always expensive and usually distracting. Most teams would be better advised to invest in youth coaching and infrastructure rather than another round of sackings at the top.

Consider the following logic. If every club sacked its coach on the basis that they were searching for Sir Alex Ferguson, at the end of the process there would still only be one club with Sir Alex Ferguson, and dozens of disappointed teams, because there can only ever be one manager who is the best in the world. Sometimes it's better to work with what you've got rather than chase fantasies.

Secondly, I acknowledge that teams can gain a competitive advantage through smarter, clearer use of data and statistics. We all know about Moneyball and the Oakland A's. Cricket has a more current example: the Rajasthan Royals. They underspend and overachieve. And, like the A's, they use data to study how games are really won, instead of just recycling clichés. According to Raghu Iyer, the Royals' CEO, their strategy is not to buy famous players but to "out-think the opposition" at the player auction.

Thirdly, I believe in the power of culture. The recurrent success of some national sides cannot be explained by random cycles of dominance. Some sporting cultures achieve success because they get more things right, from grass roots to World Cup final. The All Blacks play a wonderful brand of total rugby. They rely on skills developed throughout New Zealand's rugby culture. In Dunedin this March, during rain delays in the cricket Test match between England and New Zealand, I watched Otago practise on the adjacent rugby ground. Everyone can pass, everyone has awareness, there are no donkeys and no under-skilled thugs.

	The serious analyst of sport runs into difficulties when he argues that "an Australian would never have dropped that catch because they're tougher over there", or "India lost the match because they should have picked X"

Something similar can be said about Spanish football. Only once have I succumbed to a satirical rant on Twitter. It was during the European Cup final of 2012. In the lead- up to the match, we had to endure ill-informed punditry about how Spain's refusal to pick "an outright striker" was a negative move, how they played a cautious game based on control of the ball rather than dynamic sweeping moves, how rival teams ought to do this and ought to do that, as though opponents hadn't already tried everything and simply lost. Basically there was a widespread reluctance to admit that Spain had developed a systemic solution to playing a better, more modern brand of football. This struck me as both insane and ungracious.

In the 14th minute, Cesc Fabregas, an attacking midfielder who was playing instead of the lamentably absent "outright striker", scored a typically classy goal. The goal revealed the interaction of control, technique, movement, intelligence and team work - a microcosm of Spanish footballing philosophy. Spain went on to win 4-0, and this columnist could not resist a series of sarcastic tweets about "boring Spain", "stupid selection", "wrong-headed tactics" and so on.

But I'm not certain, returning to our original question, that the influence of national sporting culture should be filed under the heading "tactics". It is more a case of philosophy culminating in elite expression. Put differently: if Spain had been instructed by their manager to play a violent, low-skill form of football in that final, I doubt they could have done so. So deeply ingrained is their approach that it has become second nature, not really a "tactic" at all.

I thrill to all three of these methods of gaining an edge in sport: through leadership, via analysis, and through culture.

However, and here is the crucial point, not everything that happens on the sports pitch can be explained in terms of leadership and strategy, or even culture (though the influence of culture is so subtle that it's impossible to measure).

This is especially true over the short term. The serious analyst of sport runs into difficulties when he argues that "an Australian would never have dropped that catch because they're tougher over there", or "India lost the match because they should have picked X", or "imagine how good we'd be if we changed the captain". Above all, my scepticism about causes kicks in when a match is lost and a media inquest begins into everything that immediately preceded the defeat, as though the former inevitably led to the latter.

In sport, as in life, I believe in the capacity of innovation, strategy and intelligence to make a difference over the long term. But that faith can coexist with the right to challenge the retrofitting of today's causes to suit yesterday's events.

You can be a short-term sceptic and still a long-term optimist.

England's Strategy for Success

All for One, One for All

Simon Hughes in Cricinfo

It was in 1997 that the chairman of the ECB, Lord MacLaurin, declared England would be the best team in the world within a decade. His aspiration was ridiculed at the time - and two years later England sank to the bottom of the unofficial Wisden world rankings. In 2011, with the 4-0 win over India, they finally realised their ambition. Four years late, perhaps, but no one was counting - even if the calculators were out again in 2012 when they lost 3-0 to Pakistan. 

There were many reasons for their elevation, not least the decline of other, once distinguished, sides. But to cite that alone would be to belittle England's feat, which was the result of considerable talent, careful planning and total dedication. To attain sporting predominance, it was ever thus.

Central contracts, introduced during Duncan Fletcher's regime, in 2000, were a major factor. They gave the players a sense of belonging at international level, empowered the coaches to work closely with their charges and, vitally, gave them time. England now have a backroom staff who at times outnumber the players. While this arouses some scepticism in the media, especially among the in-my-day fraternity, there is no doubting their worth as England transformed the art of cricket into something more scientific. In that spirit, here is a suitably ordered analysis of their route to the top.

 

1. The right stuff
 

It all began when Andrew Strauss and Andy Flower, two determined and ambitious men, joined forces in early 2009. Their first step was to identify players with the right character, and sift out anyone not completely in tune with the team's goals. Chief among these were Andrew Flintoff - emblematic as ever as he approached the end of his career, but a law unto himself - and his faintly lethargic sidekick Steve Harmison. Flower recognised the team was sprinkled with what he regarded as individual plcs and saw the importance of selling them off. He and Strauss developed a slogan, "The team is not a hire car", which encouraged the players to treat it with care and respect, rather than take advantage of it like a hatchback leased from Avis. They introduced a new level of commitment, consideration and honesty, and everyone bought into the ethos. Now, there was genuine delight at each other's successes.

 

2. Cover all bases
 

Keen to draw on ideas from other sports, Flower went to The Oval soon after taking over to watch a game of American football, strangely enough. He was struck not only by the number of coaches employed by the NFL's Green Bay Packers, but by the meticulous organisation of the pre-match training. As a result, England rehearse their roles with all manner of accessories. There are bright orange ramps off which close catches are skimmed; extra-thin bats for slicing slip catches; rubber clubs for whacking balls into orbit; springy stumps or mini-goals to shy at; and small square frames of elasticated mesh off which the ball ricochets to replicate bat-pad catches. Every possible fielding scenario is visualised and practised with total concentration. Unsurprisingly, England's out-cricket has been consistently better than anyone else's, while Jimmy Anderson - who among other key positions now stands at slip to Graeme Swann - is possibly the best all-round fielder England have ever had.

 

3. Wot no football?
 

Warm-ups with a kickabout had become an incongruous cliche´: in no other sport do players prepare by playing, well, another sport. Since the arrival as fitness coach of Welshman Huw Bevan, the former conditioning coach of the Ospreys rugby union team, England's training has been more rigorous, while the drills fit the disciplines. Fast bowlers are taken through a succession of 24 short sprints to replicate a four-over spell. Batsmen bat overs and are ordered to run the occasional three during an enervating net. Fielders are carefully filmed to pinpoint their biomechanical strengths and weaknesses. Data relating to successful catches, diving stops and run-outs is also collated by assistant coach Richard Halsall.

With an incessant schedule and frequent back-to-back Tests, stamina is vital. By keeping training varied, Bevan has raised fitness standards to almost Olympic levels. One of Flower's favourite moments of the 2010-11 Ashes win came when Jonathan Trott, after batting more than eight hours for an undefeated 168 in Melbourne, still had the energy, alertness and agility to swoop low at extra cover and run out Phil Hughes early in Australia's reply. The practice - amusing to some - of running over to a team-mate to congratulate him after a good stop not only induces a feeling of claustrophobia in the batsman but wards off lethargy in the field.

 

4. The whole world in one place
 

For some time England have led the field in cricket gadgets. Following on from Merlyn, an ingenious piece of engineering that can propel any kind of spin to precise specification, was ProBatter, a souped-up bowling machine that had the approach and delivery of opposing bowlers projected, film-like, on to its front to face the batsman. Using Hawk-Eye data, it can even reproduce actual overs from Tests.

This is as close as it gets to cricketing time travel: if you didn't handle a spell very well first time round, now is your chance to make amends. In effect, ProBatter transports the international game's bowling brethren to the nets at the ECB Academy in Loughborough. There is also a device that measures the amount of revolutions imparted by a spinner; unsurprisingly, Swann scores highly.

 

5. Pinpoint accuracy
 

England collect a wealth of data on their opponents. For any opposing batsman, the pitch is divided into coloured squares, with a statistic in each one revealing how the batsman fares when the ball lands there. In some cases, it confirms what everyone already knew: Mike Hussey, for example, is brutal against anything short and wide. But it also offers the bowlers clues about a batsman's weaknesses: in 2011, it proved a major aid in combating Sachin Tendulkar, as England plugged away outside off in the knowledge this was the best means of keeping him quiet.

Most significantly, England had the bowlers to put these plans into action. Anderson, in particular, can land the ball in the same spot time after time, though he is also extraordinarily versatile. Two deliveries from the recent past stand out: the ball to dismiss the left-handed Hussey for eight in Melbourne, tantalisingly pitched a fraction outside off stump, just short of a half-volley, inviting the drive, then nipping away a fraction to take the edge; and a near mirror-image to the right-handed Virender Sehwag in the second innings at Edgbaston. The plan had been to bowl straight as a die, but Stuart Broad said in the dressing-room beforehand: "I've just had a vision: Sehwag caught Strauss bowled Anderson zero." Anderson decided to offer the Indian opener, on a pair, the carrot of a driveable ball. Just as Broad had predicted, Sehwag had a swish and sliced it to Strauss at first slip to depart for a king pair. Despite their superb discipline, then, the bowlers were never dissuaded from going with their hunches.

 

6. Cherish the ball
 

The potency of a new ball is taken as read, and England generally make excellent use of it. With the help of bowling coach David Saker they focused on the periods when a ball is older and less effective, and worked on different strategies. Led by Anderson, they developed the wobble-seam delivery for use when the ball has lost its initial shine - after about 20 overs - but still has a proud seam. Released with the seam slightly canted, rather than bolt upright, the ball lands on the edge of the seam, then moves unpredictably. With meticulous care, they were also able to find reverse-swing earlier, sometimes by the 12th over. The key is to keep the ball scrupulously dry, so it is kept off the grass, or bounced on bare, rough parts of the square, and religiously passed back to the bowler via the sweat-free Alastair Cook.

 

7. Don't change gear
 

If bowlers are Test-match finishers, then batsmen do the spadework. But until recently England have rarely run up mammoth totals. Watching the way prolific subcontinental batsmen such as Mahela Jayawardene and Rahul Dravid assembled their scores, they realised the secret was to keep playing the same way throughout an innings, rather than seek to go through the gears and finally dominate the bowlers. Players such as Cook and Trott abided by this philosophy, picking up their runs quietly, unobtrusively, incessantly. They never sought to score in unfamiliar areas, sticking instead to their own risk-free plans. Cook's extraordinary propensity to avoid sweating - his sole pair of batting gloves were still bone dry after his marathon 294 against India at Edgbaston - has certainly helped.

Graham Gooch - England's leading run-scorer and now the batting coach - has been a major influence in this regard. He focused the players' minds with simple sayings like "play straight - be great", and encouraged them to convert "daddy" hundreds (150-plus) into "grand-daddies" (200-plus). He has also been unstinting in his support, whether feeding them thousands of balls with his ingenious Sidearm thrower, or hardening their mental approach. The result was six individual double-centuries in 12 Tests and seven team totals of over 500.

 

8. The end of the tail-end
 

One statistic put the England-India series into perspective: England's last five wickets averaged 57 runs each; India's 20. This was no accident, for the England lower order spend almost as much time in the nets as the main batsmen. Importantly, though, there is no pressure applied to them from the top and middle order: each lower-order batsman ("tailender" now feels obsolete) is encouraged to be positive and do what comes naturally, as long as it is not reckless and takes into consideration both the batting partner and the match situation.

 

9. Doing the maths
 

Flower was profoundly influenced by Moneyball, Michael Lewis's fascinating account of how the Oakland Athletics baseball team used statistics and computer analysis to improve their results. The recruitment of Nathan Leamon - cricket coach, maths boffin, and known in the team as "Numbers" - has been significant. On a daily basis, he enters individual, team, ground and other historical data into the Monte Carlo simulator, a specially designed computer program which forecasts the probability of various eventualities. These projections form the basis of England's decision-making - from team selection and what to do at the toss, to declarations, field settings and bowling strategies. Leamon played the Melbourne Test of 2010-11 through his simulator thousands of times in advance, concluding that England were 15-20% more likely to win if they bowled first. The statistics not only convinced England, but also invigorated them after their defeat at Perth: on Boxing Day, at the spiritual home of Australian sport, they put the home side in and promptly skittled them for 98. Three days later, the Ashes had been retained.

 

10. A constant quest
 

As a player, Flower had a restless desire for self-improvement. As a coach, he has imbued that urge in his team, though he admitted he fell short of his own high standards before the series against Pakistan in the UAE; if that was untypical, his honesty was not. Flower says he tries to make each individual keen to discover how good they can possibly be, which is why he and the coaching staff offer the players regular challenges to better themselves. The squad met at Cardiff Castle at the beginning of last summer to discuss how they could continue to progress. All the bowlers and three batsmen - Cook, Trott and Pietersen - were regarded as having attained world-class status after the Ashes, but others were lagging behind. By the end of last summer, during which the bowlers continued to reign supreme, England had four batsmen (now including Ian Bell) in the world top 10, two genuine allrounders (Broad and Tim Bresnan), plus Matt Prior, who had the best batting average of any England wicketkeeper. In short, they had no weak link. In the end, it was hardly surprising they crushed India.

Between the nadir of 51 all out in Jamaica in February 2009 and the end of 2011, England played 34 completed Tests, won 20 and lost only four. When asked to pinpoint one underlying reason for their success, Strauss said simply: "A team working together." While this may sound tautological, in high-level sport it is notoriously hard to achieve. Just ask Martin Johnson or Fabio Capello.

Tips in PR management during a crisis

By John McTernan in The Telegraph

8:11PM BST 20 Jul 2011

Halfway through my time as his political secretary, Tony Blair offered me some excellent advice: “You only have to break one of their legs, John.” In vain did I protest that I had never broken a single leg, let alone both. The point Blair was making was that political operatives need to be either feared or respected.

The truth, exposed horrendously over the past fortnight, is that David Cameron’s current operation in Downing Street is neither.

The issue here is not that Ed Miliband has made the political weather – though he has. It is that the Government’s response has been supine. In a crisis, what is required from the centre is “grip”: a tightly controlled and clearly visible strategy that reframes the problem and creates the political space for you to move on. None of that has been apparent.

What should Downing Street have done? Well, the first rule of crisis management is that you need to understand the full dimensions of the problem. That means assembling all the facts: getting everyone together, collecting all the data, making sure that you know exactly what happened and when. Above all, it requires you to ask all the questions that you know will be put to you, especially the ones that you fear the most. This has clearly not been done.

Speaking in the House of Commons yesterday, the Prime Minister could not say whether Neil Wallis, the former News of the World executive who apparently acted as an informal adviser to Andy Coulson before the election, had been into Downing Street to see Coulson after it.

Well, someone in the Garden Room – the home of the elite administrators who keep the Government ticking over – could have checked the diary.
More basically, everyone who comes into No 10 has an entry on a database that the police check at the gate. A simple search would have sufficed to provide the PM with an answer. And that was just one small fact. What was needed was a far more searching process that pulled together every angle, and every possible line of attack.
This was not because full, frank and fearless disclosure was required, but because a choice had to be made. Just as you get only one chance to make a first impression, in a scandal you get only one chance to make a clean breast of things.
The key, though, is to realise that you don’t need to tell the whole truth – just nothing but the truth. Don’t lie. Don’t equivocate. But set out a defensible truth: one that you will not have to expand, modify or resile from.
In all crises, there is a similar pattern. Some information will initially be suppressed, but it will dribble out, or be dragged out. In any event, it won’t be kept secret, and when it emerges, you will end up looking shifty or malevolent. Full disclosure is important, but – speaking cynically – only of what will eventually come out.
Be economical if you are sure some sources are utterly secure. Just be honest about what will become public, and don’t try to conceal it. In any scandal, there are some things it is impossible to evade; your only chance of survival will be to endure them.
To date, there have been no signs that anyone in No 10 has grasped these laws. Paradoxically, the last Cameron staffer who got this, who could have predicted and anticipated the trajectory that the story would take, was Andy Coulson.
With Coulson gone, there has been no trace of the feral in the No 10 DNA – indeed, the new Downing Street prides itself on being a less political place than under Labour, and on operating with fewer special advisers.
What this fails to take into account is that politics is a contact sport. It’s not about “sofa government”: it’s about effective government. No one would have called Jonathan Powell, Tony Blair’s consigliere, “feral”, but he always had someone who could do the business as part of his team: tough, respected operators such as Alastair Campbell, Sally Morgan, Pat McFadden or Darren Murphy.
Who fits the bill in the current set-up? Search me. Indeed, search the house, and the surrounding buildings. No one can do the necessary low politics. For example, Ed Llewellyn, the current chief of staff, is as decent a man as I have dealt with in politics.
He understands that his role is, in part, to shield the Prime Minister from trouble. But in apparently failing to pass on warnings about Andy Coulson, he neglected his duty to put the difficult questions to the boss, even if they were rejected.
The entire civil service machine is paid to say yes to the PM, but his staff – particularly the most senior – are paid to say no. It is fine for him to press ahead with his chosen strategy, but he should have the alternatives, and the costs and benefits, laid out.
The greatest asset of the Cameron operation is the Prime Minister himself. His performance in the Commons yesterday, for example, was typically polished. No one can match his sweeping mastery of the Chamber, or his contemptuous dismissal of objectionable questions. It was a classic of its kind: hours on his feet, answering endless questions, super-cool, witty, calm.
And yet the flaws were revealing. First, it was all his own work. We were back to Cameron in his pomp, the greatest single explicator of the Government’s policies, actions and strategies.
It’s a huge gift, and the Coalition would sink without it. But it emphasised once more that this is what he is – the only one who can make that compelling case. And second, it was a Commons performance on an issue that has broken through to the streets.
Earlier this week, my partner realised that the two women walking behind her on a suburban street were discussing the quality and veracity of News International’s evidence to the select committee. This has become an issue where the public know (and care) enough to become expert.
This is where the flaws in No 10’s strategy – or lack of it – will rebound on the PM. At certain key moments yesterday, he showed a fatal lack of detail, or recall. Why was there no ready response to Tom Watson’s question about his letter to Cameron, which contained warnings about Coulson that went ignored? The PM and his team can’t have imagined that Watson would be absent, or that the Speaker would overlook him.
And why so evasive on the private firm that “vetted” Coulson – is the name really going to stay secret? After all, it would have received government money, and elsewhere ministers boast of total transparency in costs and supply of services.
All governments need head-kickers: in their Cabinets, on their backbenches, and in their offices. It has been a stunning miscalculation not to have a proper political operation in No 10 – and arguably, yet another way that the Coalition has deeply damaged the Tory party. Worse, it has deprived Cameron of a key instrument of government: effective enforcement.
For want of a strategy, Cameron is now tied to Coulson: if the latter is shown to have lied – indeed, if he is convicted of perjury – it is unlikely that a prime ministerial apology to the Commons will be sufficient penance. Sir John Junor used to ask, in his own inimitable way: “Who is in charge of the clattering train?” Well, who is?