What Are The Odds?

Betting against the numbers in cricket

The numbers are a part, though only a part, of the joy of cricket. Anyone who takes pleasure in the patterns that numbers make will understand that cricket offers ample opportunities for mathematical indulgence. It is a sport, gladiatorially individual within a team setting, that lends itself to statistical analysis. These days, the habit has spread to other sports, not all of them quite so hospitable. In Hitting Against The Spin: How Cricket Really Works, their excellent account of the use of data in cricket, Nathan Leamon and Ben Jones explain sundry modern mysteries, such as the salutary return of leg spin via the shorter forms of the game. There is a brief but intriguing aside late in their work in which Leamon and Jones pour a little scorn on the application of data analysis in football. As a dynamic, team game in which the blend of players is vital, movement off the ball is paramount and what never happens is just as important as what does happen, football might just be the hardest sport to break down into a genuine statistical currency.

In a new book How To Win The Premier League, Ian Graham, for a long time the statistical guru at Liverpool, makes the contrary case. He does so calmly and judiciously; it was book which I began as a sceptic and ended as a partial convert. Along the way Graham makes a few general points which, although his only subject is football, struck me as relevant in the context of the selection of the England cricket team and, in particular, the touring party that will leave soon for three Test matches in Pakistan. Graham points out data about past performance really does mean what it says. He says regularly that raw data should be contextualized and refined and, like an advertisement for a fund manager, previous performance is never a guarantee of good returns into the future. I would like to read him on cricket because just as football – a sport more recalcitrant to analysis – is embracing data to add to the reading of the game, so we have an England selection team which repeatedly tells us that they are not very interested in returns in first class cricket, the only viable body of performance data they have available.

The touring party to Pakistan contains four bowlers – Josh Hull, Rehan Ahmed, Shoaib Bashir and Brydon Carse – who between them took 24 county championship wickets at over 78 runs each. That’s 24 between them. At 78. Rehan Ahmed, the star pupil, took 12 at 53.58, Josh Hull 2 at 182.50, Shoaib Bashir 6 at 76.8 and Brydon Carse, when he wasn’t in the dock for betting offences, 4 wicket at 106 each exactly. We might be forgiven for wondering what these gentlemen have done to merit their selection.

The answer forthcoming from the England selectors is that they have been selected for their “attributes” rather than their numbers. But if a bowler does not eventually number among his attributes the capacity to get batsmen out then he is no kind of bowler, irrespective of how tall he is. A high release point is the reason given for the selection of Shaoib Bashir and Tom Hartley. Josh Hull is 6 foot 7 and bowls with his left arm, two interesting facts which may or may not be accompanied by the ability to take wickets in Test cricket and Brydon Carse is three inches over six foot and can sometimes propel the ball down at 90miles per hour. The point to take from Graham’s book is that, though it is possible that one or indeed all of these selections could come off, it is incredibly unlikely that they all will. The chances of a gang of players with no discernible achievement behind them all proving to be successful are very low.

Ben Stokes and Brendon McCullum have received plaudits for their selection calls so far. Ben Duckett, Harry Brook, Jamie Smith, Matthew Potts, Josh Tongue and Gus Atkinson have all either been brought back or introduced by the new regime and all have prospered. But all of them are conventional selections in the sense that all of them came into Test cricket with good numbers at their back in the first class game. They are good selections all the same – there are other players who might have been called up – but none of them are outlandish selections.

The outlandish selections – the ones that prize the judgment of the man watching in the nets over the accumulated data of performance – Bashir, Hartley, Ahmed and Hull. Zac Crawley and Brydon Carse are dubious selections, but different. Both of them have a substantial body of first class work, it is just that neither of them have managed to be especially impressive. 32 with the bat for Crawley, 33 with the ball for Carse. The four selections from nowhere are all, interestingly enough, bowlers. The selectors are yet to unearth a batsman who has barely made a run and declared that they have found the next Joe Root. They are much more comfortable taking a massive punt with the bowlers but a massive punt is what it is.

The stake is highest so far for Shoaib Bahir. In an interview with Michael Atherton for Sky Sports, Brendon McCullum described Bashir as a “gun” off-spinner. It’s not obvious how good a gun off-spinner needs to be. Nathan Lyon-standard? Graham Swann? Not as good as either? Better than both? However good it is, it must be pretty good as McCullum has said of Bashir on another occasion that he believes he will develop into a world class spin bowler.

But is there much reason to think so? The pliant press pack are certainly not asking any questions. Bashir has had very good notices so far, quite out of proportion to his actual performances. Lawrence Booth said in the Mail that Bashir is now acknowledged as the best slow bowler in the country. Well, hardly. After Somerset were spun to victory against Surrey there is a case for saying that, after Jack Leach and Archie Vaughan, Bashir is now Somerset’s third best spinner. He certainly wouldn’t make the first XI. His Test career so far has been decent but not remarkable. Bashir took 17 wickets in India on turning pitches and then got a few cheap West Indian tail-enders. The series against Sri Lanka was hardly a triumph, though. Six wickets at well over 50 each and, in the last five innings of the series he took 3-251 from 64 overs. The only top seven batsmen he dismissed was Angelo Mathews. Will he get good batsmen out without a lot of help from the pitch? Maybe, but it’s a punt and it is not odds on.

Of the other three, there is a case for saying that Reham Ahmed, a child prodigy, is a different case. It’s reasonable to pick someone early who might conceivably be a superstar. A player like that will have no performance to go on, by definition. A season on, though, it looks as if Rehan might not even be the best bowler in his own family. His younger brother Farhan, in a few games for Nottinghamshire, already looks like an international off-spinner in the making. Even at this early stage you would say he is a better bet than Bashir. Tom Hartley had one good spell in India, when the Indian batsmen gifted him a few wickets by chipping to the boundary, but for the rest of the series he looked well below the necessary standard. He was, after all, a replacement for the injured Jack Leach, although why he was preferred to Liam Dawson, the third highest wicket taker this season and a man with 16 first class centuries to boot, is anyone’s guess. Josh Hull is the most extraordinary selection of all. As Michael Vaughan rather deftly said after The Oval “there is a lot to worth with but also a lot to work on”.

None of these judgements are certainties. All of the players selected could come off and have fine careers. The lesson of Ian Graham’s book on statistics is that we are not dealing with definitive statements and firm judgements. We are dealing with probabilities and likelihoods. We cannot say much with complete certainty but we can be fairly sure that, by taking so many unlikely punts on their bowers, the England selectors are not giving themselves the best chance of success.