Kartikeya Date
The story of an offspinner and a batsman
Or why Test cricket is at its most interesting when not much seems to be happening
Kartikeya Date
19-Nov-2016
It was the middle of the day. The sun was high in sky and the cricket ground was silent. The bowler stood a few paces behind the umpire, to his left. He was about to jog up to the wicket and lob the ball towards the batsman - a right-hander.
It was a conventional 3-6 field for the offspinner. Mid-off and cover close together, and a first slip. The captain was more willing to concede runs square of the cover fielder than he was between cover and mid-off. That way, the batsman would have to drive more acutely against the spin. On the leg side, mid-on, midwicket and square leg formed a ring of three in front of the wicket. The fielder on the boundary behind square on the leg side was the lone boundary-rider. A forward short-leg and a leg gully completed the field.
During the course of the day, the offspinner's approach varies. Batsmen try to disturb the bowler's length using a variety of tactics. Some step out of the crease and drive, just to create doubt in the bowler's mind. Others play off the back foot repeatedly, an old-fashioned ploy that causes the bowler's length to be dragged fuller. When this happens, the batsman can drive with certainty.
Full postWill Cook break all of Tendulkar's Test records?
At 31, he already holds all the major England batting records. The insurmountable peak now looks scaleable
Kartikeya Date
24-Oct-2016
When Alastair Cook walked out for the toss in Chittagong on October 20, 2016, he became England's most capped Test player. At the time of writing, he holds every England Test batting record worth holding. He has made more Test runs, more Test hundreds, more Test fifties and played in more Test wins (and scored more runs in Test wins) than any other England cricketer in history.
He has captained England in 54 Tests, a record he currently shares with Mike Atherton. Since World War II, only Joe Root, Denis Compton, Ken Barrington and Len Hutton have improved on Cook's career Test average of 47.
Cook's Test average matches that of Kevin Pietersen, Ted Dexter, Peter May, Dennis Amiss and Geoff Boycott. No other England player since the war averages better than 45 runs per dismissal. Cook is also the only English player to score more than 10,000 Test runs. In the current England line-up, Root is more than 6000 runs behind.
Cook belongs in exalted company. But perhaps the most stunning thing about his career is that it has taken him fewer than 11 years to achieve all these records. That's less than half the length of Sachin Tendulkar's Test career. If Cook plays for as long as Tendulkar did, he will play nearly 300 Test matches, score nearly 24,000 Test runs and 66 Test hundreds, provided he maintains his current rate. At the end, he'll be a very tired 45-year-old man.
Full postThe two-tier proposal would have shrunk cricket
The increasing number of T20s are already squeezing out the other two formats on the calendar. A split Test league favouring the top teams would have been disastrous in the long term
Kartikeya Date
20-Sep-2016
The ICC recently set aside a proposal to divide Test cricket into two tiers.
The idea of dividing Test-playing nations into two leagues is often accompanied by a proposal to turn bilateral Test tours into components of a larger league. It is not clear why spectators would be more likely to watch a Test match today because it is part of a Test championship where the title will be awarded three years from now. The argument about "context" seems to be little more than a rhetorical device for justifying the shrinking of the highest level of cricket to a competition among seven teams. Though the proposal has been shelved for now, the actions of cricket's administrators in recent years suggest that under the guise of making the game more competitive, Test cricket will eventually be reduced to a smaller competition.
In the 21st century, as cricket has become a lucrative commodity for television broadcasters, no board has been able to resist the temptation to shape things in a way that suits the interests of broadcasters. This is especially true about T20, the most lucrative format, one made for TV.
Full postWhy limited-overs cricket needs to measure boundaries attempted
Instead of averages and strike rates, batsmen could be judged on how much in control of their shots they are, in conjunction with how many fours and sixes they try to hit
Kartikeya Date
13-Aug-2016
The things that are measured in cricket are typically self-evident. Interpretation is not required to count runs, wickets, deliveries, extras, boundaries or sixes. Other sports have embraced measurements that require interpretation. In tennis a distinction is made between a "forced error" and an "unforced error". In baseball, "earned runs" and "unearned runs" are distinguished by judging whether or not a safe hit was the result of a fielding error or not. Baseball also has the concept of "defensive indifference". In American football, things like "decisive passes" and "assists" and "tackles" are counted systematically.
ESPNcricinfo records a "control" measurement for every delivery added to its database. This measure is based on the answer to the question "Was the batsman in control of the ball?" Two answers are possible - yes (in control) and no (not in control), but it is not always self-evident whether or not the batsman was in control or not in control. This is probably the very first attempt in cricket to develop a measure that involves the systematic use of judgement.
If the bowler beats the bat, finds the edge, or induces a miscue, then even if no dismissal results, the batsman is said to be not in control. A lofted drive off the middle of the bat that results in a catch at the boundary is not in control. As readers will notice, these conclusions require the exercise of judgment. It follows that some judgements will be easily arrived at, others not so much. A classic example is when a batsman is tested just outside off stump and starts out playing at the ball but withdraws the bat at the last minute. Was the bat withdrawn in time? Whether or not the batsman is judged to be in control of the delivery will depend on the answer to this question.
Full postWhy hitting is more optimal than batting in T20
A simulation model that predicts outcomes of limited-overs matches drives the point home
Kartikeya Date
12-Jul-2016
I've recently become interested in the dominance of power hitters in T20, and the idea that constructing innings and investing in bowling may not be the most optimal way to play in T20. The distinction between hitting and batting seems to me to be foundational to the difference between T20 and cricket. In this article, I present evidence that shows that in T20, hitting (the willingness to risk dismissal readily in search of quicker scoring) is more optimal than batting (the desire to build an innings and score runs with certainty).
Last year I built a model that predicts the outcomes of limited-overs games. The result of the model is a win probability for each of the two teams based on the individual records, at the start of a match, of the players involved in the match. The approach used is that of a simple Monte Carlo simulation. A complete description of the method is available here. Readers ought to be able to build the model (or their own variant/development) based on the description.
The graph below shows the results of the model over 3750 ODI games. For each game, the model produces an expected win probability for each team as well as the expectation of a tie in the match. The expected win probabilities range from 0 to 100%. In the chart below, teams have been grouped by expected win probabilities within a range of 2% (the first group represents a group of teams expected to win 0-2% of the time, the second 2-4% of the time and so on). "Actual Win %" is an answer to the question "How many teams out of the teams expected to win within this range of probabilities actually won?" The graph below represents the expected win probabilities in comparison with the actual win percentages.
Full postTwo myths about the IPL
Is Kohli as good at T20 as he is cracked up to be? And did the better bowling side win this year's title?
Kartikeya Date
31-May-2016
The 2016 IPL was a record-breaking tournament for India's Test captain. Two tropes about the season have become apparent. First, that Virat Kohli is a great T20 player. Second, that the best bowling attack in the tournament defeated the best batting line-up. Both claims are arguably false.
Let's consider the first. Kohli was not even the best player in the Royal Challengers Bangalore side, let alone in the IPL. He seemed to attempt to make the transition from batting to hitting during the course of the tournament, but he never quite shed his classical training as a batsman. In the final, for example, he made 54 off 35 balls. He used up more than 25% of the deliveries available to his team and scored at less than the overall asking rate. He made only 15 off his first 18 balls. A true-blue T20 hitter would not have waited 18 balls to tee off when faced with an asking rate of ten runs per over. The problem with waiting that long is that one has to then pull off slogs for much longer in order to break even.
When the asking rate is ten runs per over over 20 overs, there simply aren't many options. This is not a problem of the imagination, it is a compulsion of arithmetic. The great difference between Kohli and AB de Villiers (the best player in the 2016 RCB side) is that de Villiers can tee off from the start if need be. De Villiers found the boundary once every 4.3 balls. Kohli was a whole delivery slower, at 5.3 balls per boundary. Each hit almost the same number of sixes through the competition (37 for de Villiers, 38 for Kohli), and Kohli faced 233 extra deliveries.
Full postHow to bring singles back into T20
The format favours power hitters and bowlers of limited talent, which leads to the marginalisation of the single as a scoring unit
Kartikeya Date
04-May-2016
In my last post, I pointed to the fact that West Indies, despite not having the greatest fielding side or being the fastest team between the wickets, have been successful at winning T20 games. Elsewhere I've written about how, over the first eight seasons of the IPL, boundary hitting has been the decisive factor in deciding games. More crucially, scoring singles, twos and threes (non-boundary runs) has not been a factor.
Over 501 IPL games, the side that scored fewer singles has won 58% of the games, while the side that scored fewer non-boundary runs has won 56% of the time. Seventy-six per cent of winning teams have played out fewer dot balls than their opponents.
Two defining facts emerge about T20 cricket. First, power-hitting depth trumps all other factors. Second, singles are usually not contested by the fielding side. This is a counter-intuitive fact that is also revealed in ODI cricket.
Full postWest Indies: perfectly built for T20
Of all the teams in the tournament, they had the deepest, most lethal six-hitting capacity
Kartikeya Date
06-Apr-2016
What do we know about the respective run-scoring abilities of the two XIs that faced each other in the World T20 final?
In the table below, INNS is innings batted in, AGG is aggregate, SR is strike rate per 100 balls faced, BFPD is balls faced per dismissal, BFP4 is balls faced per four, BFP6 is balls faced per six. This record takes into account every T20 game played by the players in the final for any T20 side for which a scorecard is available.
| Team | INNS | AGG | SR | BFPD | BFP4 | BFP6 |
| England | 936 | 19362 | 133.6 | 18.4 | 8.0 | 20.5 |
| West Indies | 1344 | 29644 | 132.0 | 21.4 | 9.5 | 14.2 |
Australia v India and the ineffectiveness of the full-length delivery
An analysis of why the bat lorded it over ball in the recent ODI series, combining pitching-point data with ball-by-ball information
Kartikeya Date
14-Mar-2016
India and Australia played an extraordinary bilateral ODI series in Australia earlier this year. The bat dominated the ball in a way rarely seen before. India lost 4-1 but were bowled out only once, for 323 in the fourth game, chasing 348.
Bilateral series of five matches or more in which the overall scoring rate is above six runs per over are not uncommon. Of the 29 teams that have managed to score at better than six runs per over in a bilateral series of at least five matches, only six have ended up on the losing side. And only India have lost by a margin of three wins.
Seven of 11 such series so far have involved India. Given India's below-average fast bowling options and above-average batting, this is not surprising. Of those 11, the recent Australia v India series had the highest batting average (50.51 runs per wicket). The bowlers were never in the game.
Full postChanderpaul's greatness goes beyond numbers
His unconventional, underappreciated technique helped him dominate and suppress the best bowling attacks through his career
Kartikeya Date
01-Feb-2016
Shivnarine Chanderpaul made his Test debut in a team that had not lost a Test series for 14 years. Its bowling attack was the envy of the cricket world and its batsmen were experienced, seasoned professionals. The XI for the second Test of the 1993-94 Wisden Trophy included Desmond Haynes, Richie Richardson, Jimmy Adams, Brian Lara, Curtly Ambrose and Courtney Walsh. Back then a tour to the West Indies was tougher than one to Australia and England.
In the 21st century, West Indies have won one and lost 45 of their 62 away Tests, and won only four out of 20 home series against Test opponents other than Bangladesh and Zimbabwe. Chanderpaul made 9185 Test runs at 55.7 in this period. Only Jacques Kallis and Kumar Sangakkara have done better. In the history of West Indies cricket, only Brian Lara made more runs. The West Indies top seven, including Chanderpaul, made 25,351 runs at an average of 32 in away Tests (excluding those in Bangladesh and Zimbabwe) from the start of 2001. Excluding the runs contributed by Chanderpaul and Lara, who averaged 48 and 60 respectively, the rest of the top seven contributed 19,231 runs at 28.5! This means that the other five or six spots in the West Indies top order in these Tests have been occupied on average by a specialist Test batsman who averaged 28.5.
Lara's is a recurring presence in Chanderpaul's story. In Chanderpaul's debut Test, Lara made an imperious 167 in less than five hours; Chanderpaul made a relatively cautious 62. In Antigua later in that series, Chanderpaul was at the other end when Lara went past Garfield Sobers' world record for the highest Test score. While Lara was in the West Indies side, Chanderpaul lived in his shadow, much like Rahul Dravid lived in Sachin Tendulkar's. What turned out to be Lara's final Test, in November 2006 against Pakistan in Karachi, was Chanderpaul's 101st Test match. West Indies lost, Lara was dismissed for 49 in his final Test innings, and Chanderpaul played two fighting hands of 36 and 69 out of West Indian totals of 260 and 244.
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