The dedicated armchair watcher, equipped with satellite coverage, has a lot of cricket to watch at the moment. At the time of writing, England are struggling against New Zealand and India are struggling to get onto the pitch against Pakistan. Then there is a full set of County Championship matches to follow. And already today I have encountered six suggestions that the explanation for a batsman’s good performance – the term is rarely applied to bowlers – is that he is in good form. It’s a statement that always makes me wonder.
The sense that a batsman is either in or out of form is such a staple of cricketing analysis that it would be quite a discovery to find that it does not exist. The great cricketing sage, JM Brearley, has written a whole book, On Form which skirts around the subject without ever once pausing to offer a serviceable definition. Whenever “form” is mentioned it is simply assumed as a category, as if nobody would dare question it.
But is it as obvious as all that? It is true, indeed it is obvious, that sportsmen pass through different psychological states with respect to their game. When a batsman has played well a few times in succession he is routinely said to be “in good form”. Maybe all this means is that the batsman has played well a few times in succession, as a player of his ability is liable to do. But if feels as if more is being said. The speaker does mean to say more than this. So, what are we adding by saying a batsman is in good form? What, if anything, do we mean?
I am not sure we mean anything. I am not sure Brearley means anything by form, either. People who have played well feel better about themselves than people who have played badly. Feeling good about yourself no doubt helps you to play well next time, though obviously we all regress eventually back to the limits of our talent. But if this were true, if form were a real thing – rather than simply the name we give to good performances – then we would need a definition and some statistical proof.
Imagine a batsman with the talent to average 40 over a long period in Test cricket. Then imagine that his scores were randomly distributed. His scoring obeyed no real pattern – it was simply random. It would include – as random distributions do – a few clusters of good scores (which would have Nasser Hussain saying he was “in nick”). And he would have a few clusters of poor scores (which would have Nasser Hussain saying he was “out of nick”). But it would be rubbish. The pattern is random and the idea of “form” has no explanatory value at all.
In order for “form” to be a real thing the batsman would have to experience clusters of good and bad scores that were more than would be expected in a random distribution. Does this happen? Brearley never even asks the question and I am yet to find a study that proves the statistical basis of the idea of “form”. Maybe there is one. Maybe readers can point me to it. I suspect, though, that “form” is just sporting jargon and means nothing more than “didn’t he do well?”
A few years ago, I wanted to write a book about this. Had a treatment together and everything. Try to speak to people known for gaudy runs of form (Broad, most obviously, but there are plenty in golf and darts and snooker) but also in areas such as standup comedy, where performers with decades in the business can be ‘on fire’ or ‘dying’ for extended periods of time without quite knowing why. I pub-pitched it to a mate who ran the sports list at a publisher. ‘I think you want to hold your horses on that one’: he knew the Brearley book was in the pipeline. But having read it, my idea was more what you write about here. Is it actually a thing? How does it relate to technique? To psychology? To statistical randomness?
"The dedicated armchair watcher, equipped with satellite coverage, has a lot of cricket to watch at the moment"
Not to mention rugby and football....
Better performance y'day from England, and delighted as a Lancy manqué to see Livingstone do what we know he can. Whilst reviling T20, I love the long form white ball game.