Alright, settle down. It wasn't
the greatest game ever played. It wasn't even the greatest Cricket World Cup semi final in which South Africa
choked were beaten in the final over as a result of pressure-related errors. But it was fucken good times on and off line. Grant '
The Hairy Javelin' Elliot spearing a penultimate-ball six into the Eden Park crowd off a rank Dale Steyn half-tracker set New Zealand ablaze after several hours of the most astonishingly squeaky-bum semi-final cricket known to the history of the land, if not the sport.
Interesting was the response of the Twitter fanbase of putative finals opponents Straya. By and large, through the course of the game, trans-Tasman sibling rivalry was set aside, less through ANZAC loyalties and more courtesy the adoption of an 'anyone but the fucken Saffas' mindset. Aside of course from the usual shit sheep jokes
and jibes about immigrants making up 2/11ths of the team and 11/11ths of the winning shotmakery; for most modern Western democracies, 21st century international migration practices aren't something to hate and fear, but as we know, Straya isn't most modern Western democracies.
No, the interesting part was the nervous reaction from Strayan fans which went along the lines of 'let's see how they go when they move from a postage stamp to an envelope.' Not apparently a reference to eating glue off the backs of mailing stationery, because not everyone is of the intellectual standing of Dave Warner, but to the sizes of grounds in NZ and Australia respectively; Australia's cricket ovals are Australian Rules football grounds (first and foremost these days), while NZ's often (but by no means exclusively) double as rugby pitches. That perception mismatches with reality following the rise of boutique Ovals like University and Hagley at the expense of Carisbrook and the old Jade Stadium in pre-quake Chch; the Caketin in Welly was always AFL-sized (no less so than the SCG), and Eden Park is bigger than it was pre-RWC2011.
Still, what US baseball writers would call 'park effects' definitely impact what we see here. How will NZ do on a 'proper' sized ground? NZ have played 40-odd ODIs in the last two years, some of which will have been on 'proper' sized grounds. Why don't we know the answer to this already, other than scratching through foggy memories for anecdata? If this was baseball, someone would have run the numbers. They'd already have calculated the park effects for every ground - the team-independent, game-independent contribution to scoring determined by the metrics of the park itself. In baseball,
park effects or park factors cover everything from the distance to the fences, to the local air pressure;
Coors Field in Denver is a big field at altitude, and is a place pitchers go to be immolated like a Viking funeral,
while
AT&T Park, the San Francisco Giants' home field on the bay and at sea level, has the rep as being as dampening on offence as a trip into the waters of McCovey Cove. Baseball wonks can pull park effects out of their stats and determine the contribution to success or failure of a team, or even an individual pitcher or batter, which can be nominally put down to the field they play in.
So why doesn't someone run the numbers for cricket? Not just for this, but for anything? As we learn more about the way advanced metrics have transformed the way we understand sports - particularly stat-heavy American sports like baseball and basketball, where understanding-through-measuring is at its apex - the question arises, why isn't this part of our sports? Not just in terms of team back-office strategy, but more important for the most important part of the game (the person paying the bills, i.e. Me), as part of how the game is explained to fans through commentary and analysis.
Cricket, in particular, stands out as a sport dying to be advanced-metric'd to within an inch of its life. Like baseball, the original poster-sport for next-gen stats wonks, it's a game of individual contests which can be probabilistically defined: each bowler-on-batter contest has a defined series of outcomes which can be recorded, mapped, and predicted based on past outcomes, to the point where you can calculete the 'win contribution' of every one of these hundreds and thousands of interchanges.
Sabermetrics not only transformed the landscape of how baseball was played and managed and how its
teams were assembled and dismantled, but launched the nascent numbers-driven political punditry careers of the likes of
Nate Silver of Five Thirty Eight, whose statistical models (honed through his experience developing baseball metrics) famously
picked the 2012 US presidential election results with 96% accuracy.
Whether it's park effects, or determining an death-overs equivalent to
the 'times through the order' penalty which has been identified and granularised for pitchers late in a baseball game through the twin encroachments of fatigue and familiarity, we should be able to understand cricket better through smashing stats. Indeed, it's not so much a question of why this isn't a part of cricket - it would defy belief for it not to be, and (for instance) for it not to be part of the armoury of laptop-toting coaches like John Buchanan which
so reviled Warney - but why it isn't part of how the mainstream media explains the game to us. Are we too stupid, or are they? The answer sits somewhere in the middle: they can afford to be stupid, because they think we are.
A couple of weeks ago on
#BALLS Beeso and I talked about how some of the SportVue player-tracking technology which was
unlocking the advanced-metrics codes of basketball - a more complicated sport to mathematicise without the binary contests and more easily defined outcomes of baseball - was
originally developed in Australia for AFL football. This tracking tech means the position of players relative to the ball can be mapped, so you know (for instance) who's nominally guarding who, who's attempting too many hopeless contested long 2s, who's bludging on D, and even mathematically assessing who the best defensive players in the league are based on their ability to (a) deter shotmaking and/or (b) defend shots when made. This sort of knowledge doesn't replace the 'eye test', but it does unlock the power of being able to scientifically verify ideas the eye test throws forth, or pick out stuff it can't see. This is clever, cool stuff, and it adds to how we understand and enjoy the game.
As we know, Knowledge is Power, and Power is a Team in the AFL (a shit one, but a team nonetheless). Why isn't the same kind of cool tracking tech-led metrics informing the reportage of AFL football? Could be that the AFL sports media isn't up to the level of analysis required, partly because they are stupid Victorians who are stupid, partly because they don't think they have an audience which cares? The American experience seems to be that quality-seeking audience comes along as you invest in quality in your analysis. However, it could just be that
in the NBA, the league owns the tracking data, and make it available for analysis by the media or even just by punters with smarts; in the AFL (and in other leagues), the clubs do, and they ain't sharing - to their benefit, but arguably to that league's detriment. It's one thing to hoard the clever algorithms, and the clever people; it's another to prevent the data even making it to light. That way, whether the media want to smarten up their act or not, they're unlikely to have the tools or skills to. Which means those of us who pay the league's bills (whether as paying punters, cable TV subscribers, club members, or just sets of sponsor-ready eyeballs) and who want a little bit more data weighted behind the cliched post-hoc assertions of smug, combox-bound ex-players, are left disappointed by the fact our sport is still discussed, analysed and commentated upon in the same fashion as always:
gurning populist shit dribbled by absolute fuckwits.
Tops.
The Doctor is OUT.
