As England players were sitting in the change room during last year’s World T20 final, Joe Root was playing around with a fresh white ball. West Indies needed 156 to win and were favourites for one simple reason: Chris Gayle. England believed he wouldn’t fire for one simple reason: Root.
The ECB boffins had a meeting before WT20 and one of the questions which came up was this. “How do we stop Gayle?”
There was no one answer but Nathan Leamon, a performance analyst, gave a funky suggestion. “Joe Root opening the bowling.” And so it was Root bowling England’s second over. His second ball was hit over point for four.
Skipper Eoin Morgan might have flinched a little but backed Leamon and his numbers. The off-spinner’s third ball vindicated that belief.
The left-hander failed to connect properly and found Ben Stokes at long-on. Even though England lost, Leamon’s finding was right. However, it wasn’t exactly original. Another team had already implemented it to devastating effect in a high-pressure game six years ago. Chennai Super Kings’ number crunchers found that Gayle had a propensity to get out to off-spinners in the first six overs. MS Dhoni backed the findings and R Ashwin removed the West Indies batsman three balls into his innings.
It was the second time he had removed him in five days. At the first qualifying final, he had dismissed him for eight, three balls into his first over.
While big data has infiltrated almost all walks of life, its attraction to sports scientists has been well documented since Billy Beane’s sabermetrics revolution with the Oakland Athletics transformed the baseball side from also-rans to title contenders.
Most teams and leagues around the world started pouring through stats and started interpreting numbers in different ways. The Indian Premier League (IPL) was a late entrant in this revolution. The aforementioned example in 2011 was one of the first high-profile instances of a team using strategy based on findings by data scientists on Excel. “We did this in 2011,” Lakshmi Narayanan M, a former CSK performance analyst, tells Express. “That time, we weren’t obviously telling this out to people. We found that Gayle looked a bit susceptible to off-spinners early on. Ashwin and Dhoni did the rest.”
Narayanan, now with Gujarat Lions in a similar capacity, says IPL is having its own data revolution. “Since 2014, when we had that really big auction, numbers have played a huge role. It wasn’t like that in 2011. We also looked towards how a few other clubs and leagues in Europe and America started using empirical analysis to study their opposition.”
The use of stats to interpret something as emotional, as raw as sport, has been ridiculed. But Narayanan knows what he is talking about. He was part of the support staff that made CSK the undisputed kings of T20 cricket in India. In the eight years between 2008 and 2015, the Chennai-based outfit won the title twice and finished runners-up four times. In something as random as franchise-based T20 with only a level of continuity on a year-on-year basis, that sort of consistency is pretty impressive.
You realise how they achieved it after Narayanan takes you through the process that culminated in the purchase of Ashish Nehra in 2014.
“We were in the market for a bowler with a good comeback ball,” he says. “Every bowler gets hit, that’s just basic cricketing law. But what we could control was to buy a bowler who had excellent comeback numbers, someone capable of taking wickets or creating pressure through dots immediately after being hit for a boundary. Nehra’s numbers with respect to this metric were amazing,” Narayanan remembers.
That every IPL team has started using similar metrics to gain a fair advantage is known. But it’s also important when to not listen to data. Ben Stokes, by any orthodox metric, is a fantastic T20 asset. As a star, he comes with the bonus of putting bums on seats.
However, Gujarat CEO Arvinder Singh wasn’t swayed. “We didn’t need him,” he says to Express. “I had James Faulkner, Dwayne Bravo, Dwayne Smith, Ravindra Jadeja for the role of an all-rounder. So there was no discussion regarding him,” he says.
Something else that did come up for discussion was Jason Roy, who they purchased. “His strike rate and average in this form over the last two years were excellent and that convinced us,” Arvinder says. Not only that. “As an opener, it’s important that your boundaries scored per balls faced ratio is very low. The industry standard is between two and three so that the opener guarantees the team at least two boundaries every over,” Narayanan chips in. That particular number is one of at least 120 data points that can be generated during the course of a ball.
The increasing reliance of using spreadsheets on a computer to build the perfect team may offend traditionalists. But Narayanan says this will be the new normal going forward.
swaroop@newindianexpress.com