Simulating T20 Matches: Pinching

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The debate on whether Sunil Narine should open is one of my favourite in T20 cricket. I stand resolutely on team ‘yes’… but standing on team ‘yes’ does not mean that I don’t still have doubt. It wouldn’t be a debate if I didn’t see merit to arguments on both sides. I have built a simulator that will play out T20 games ball-by-ball, thousands of times, so that we can see the impact of playing in a certain way, or with a certain line-up. This means that we can set up a game between the Kolkata Knight Riders and the Sunrisers Hyderabad (say) and simulate what would happen with Narine at different spots in the line-up

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Trialling a T20 Captaincy Metric

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The importance of captaincy in cricket is greater than in almost any other sport. In football, for just one example, the captain has almost no influence whatsoever over team selection or strategy. This is not true in cricket. Not only are cricket captains involved in most strategic and tactical decision-making, this also comes with more responsibility for the other players in the team, their mindset and their morale. Measuring the value of a good captain is incredibly difficult

One aspect of captaincy that might be measurable is the decisions that they make on the field. Here, the decision-making is observable by an outsider. Obvious, even, in the case of bowling changes. They occur 20 times in an innings and at regular intervals

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Captain Typical

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My current project is a ball-by-ball simulator for T20 matches. This post isn't about that. It is about one tiny component which took way too much time to build considering how little value it contributes to the endeavour of predicting T20 outcomes. I wanted my simulator to have the ability to simulate what bowling changes the captain would make during an innings. And so I built a model to pick the next bowler

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Pinching in an IPL Final

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It's rare to witness an innings that exhibits such a clear structure. Shane Watson's century in the IPL Final against Sunrisers Hyderabad was an extraordinary innings. He failed to score from the first 10 deliveries yet finished with a 205 strike rate. To some extent, the game-plan looked ingenious because Watson was able to execute so perfectly, but it was remarkable to see him so deliberate in deciding which overs to attack

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Where should you play your best batsman?

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Rohit Sharma is the captain and assumed best batsman of the Mumbai Indians. He seems likely to bat at number 3 or 4 this season, unchanged from last year, when Buttler and Patel were generally preferred as the opening pair. Whilst those two are now gone, Mumbai did acquire another well-established opener at auction in the form of Evin Lewis, Ishan Kishan may also get the chance to impress

Last year, Sharma suggested that “probably three, four is the best position” for him but the stats emphatically disagree. In 52 matches as an opener, he averages 39.5 runs at a strike rate of 142. Both numbers drop noticeably when he arrives between 4-6, falling to an average of 32.4 runs at 132 (in 130 matches)

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IPL Auction 2018 - RTMs

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The IPL auction has been described as unfair, humiliating, and voyeuristic*. But most critics would still admit that, for the emotionally detached observer, it is flipping entertaining. There are so many factors to unravel that influence prices and teams battle an armada of seductive cognitive biases. For a data lover like myself, it provides a brand-new dataset that indicates how cricket insiders might think

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IPL Retentions 2018

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So many thoughts on the latest retention decisions. Unreasonably excited to see what happens next at the auction on January 27/28. Analysing and reacting to the economics and business strategies used in a sports leagues can sometimes be more fun than the action itself!

My aim here is merely to make sense of the retentions that have just happened. For the most part, you can generally see what the teams were thinking. There seem to be three different types of influence on the decisions that each team made: the commercial influences that help teams to make money, the financial influences that help teams to save costs, and the on-filed influences that help teams to win titles

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Gulf in the BPL

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I’m not the first person to notice the imbalance between overseas and domestic players in the BPL. With the tournament almost over, the chasm has, predictably, remained between the overseas and domestic players. The overseas players are far more productive than their Bangladeshi equivalents.

Interestingly, the overseas batsmen are consistent against both overseas and domestic bowling. In contrast, the overseas bowlers prey disproportionately on the domestic players to exhibit their superiority

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Optimising the first over

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Six games into the 2017 T20 Blast, Kent were the slowest starters in the competition. Even enduring a maiden first over at home to Gloucestershire. In their seventh game, against Somerset, the team switched things up. Joe Denly moved into the opening slot, with his partner, Bell-Drummond replacing him at the other end

Superficially, the switch appeared to work. In the following eight games, Kent were scoring more runs after 3 balls (+0.6), more runs in the first over (+0.5), and more runs in the PowerPlay (+2.6)

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First-over specialists

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Tim Wigmore @timwig recently wrote a piece on players specialised in the "art of the first over"... the surprisingly common phenomenon of otherwise part-time bowlers being called on to open the innings for the bowling team. In this post I want to delve a bit deeper into the numbers themselves and apply an analytical lens to establish what these numbers tell us

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Bowlers win tournaments

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In limited overs cricket, it is a common refrain that batsmen win matches but bowlers win tournaments. Pakistan seemed to prove this point true in the Champions Trophy this year. With the group stages over, we saw the most explosive batting line-up in the tournament fizzle out against a resurgent Pakistan bowling attack. Even without Mohammad Amir, they quickly removed the top order and then proceeded to tame the previously untameable Ben Stokes, who lasted 64 balls but without hitting a single boundary

In the final, Pakistan continued to demonstrate the importance of top bowling. Amir returned and triumphantly dismissed Sharma, Dhawan, and Kohli - the highest run-scorers in the tournament. The brilliant Hasan Ali was fittingly crowned as the player of the tournament

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Why you can't buy the IPL title

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Some teams are worth more than others. Can the most valuable franchises leverage their superior financial heft to increase their chances of winning the ultimate glory - the IPL title? Are the 2017 Royal Challengers Bangalore a common occurrence and a tale of caution not to overspend on a team of superstars, or are they the outlier in a league where money talks and high salaries are necessary to build a strong team?

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Glamour from the openers, value from the middle order

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9 of the top 10 scores in T20 cricket have been posted by opening batsman. David Warner has often single handedly dragged Sunrisers Hyderabad to victories in the last two IPL seasons as an opening batsman. The average match will feature an opening batsman spending the most time at the crease and their performances stick most in the minds of fans

In contrast, the middle order batsman are often tasked with the dirty work: maximising their teams chances of winning from the situation they inherit when they come into the game. They must be versatile and their role could be wildly different from game to game

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