International cricket rolling thread

The Game Room
643

Good to see the time-honoured English tactic of hampering your best player by making him captain is alive and well!

ETA: to give this a bit more balance, arguably it has been successful in some cases, Atherton possibly the prime example, but overall it has definitely been a negative, with Botham, Stewart, Flintoff and Root all seeming to suffer quite a bit. I think it’s particularly harsh on someone with more than one job already, especially if they are heavily relied on in at least one of those roles (same names spring to mind).

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Was Flintoff England’s best player when he was captain? I’m not sure - not just because he underperformed whilst captain but also because he shared the dressing room with the highly divisive but exceptionally talented Kevin Pietersen. Pietersen is another one you can chalk up to having had an iffy time as captain, though from memory his stats were pretty good - he was just a berk and thus not good captaincy material.

In general, it’s a fair point though, most of England’s best captains in my time watching cricket were sure of their position but not the best player in the team (Hussain, Strauss, Cook’s captaincy lacked flair but he was successful and arguably not the best player in his teams much of the time either) and if you go back beyond my years watching cricket, you’ve got the likes of Brearley who was essentially only in the side for his captaincy, such was his lack of production with the bat.

I suppose you could liken it a bit to what you see in football. Top level players, at least in the UK, rarely make the best managers - maybe it’s because they found the game so easy that they wonder why the players they’re managing can’t do what they found simple. People like Guardiola stand out in that respect, versus the likes of Ferguson, Klopp, Bob Paisley and so on. Maybe if you’re a world beating cricketer, you don’t think much about the tactics, you just trust to your talent and thus make for a poorer captain than someone who has to think about what he’s doing because it could all go wrong quickly?

Back on now. We’ve only had 4.1 overs and it’s 3-1. Sibley leaving one from Gabriel that pegged back his off stump.

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I like this theory, but I’m not sure it stands up - I did a bit of research and Fergie had a decent playing career, he was top scorer in the Scottish First Division in the 65/66 season - OK, not super-elite, but definitely a reasonable level of professional footballer. Paisley won the first division with Liverpool as a player. Even Klopp was a professional player, as well. Then you have the likes of Brian Clough who was certainly an elite player, and by all accounts traded on his playing ability as part of his management style - a sort of “I did it, so you can too” attitude, dragging people to greater heights by sheer force of personality. Which is of course not really the same as being a good coach. However, he did seem to have a knack for spotting where players’ talents could best be used. Then we have Frank Lampard Jr who seems to be making a decent fist of managing, so far (though of course his dad was a coach which must help). So I think the fact that few elite players become elite managers is mostly down to the fact that there are simply very few people who are one or the other, and the intersection is therefore tiny as a matter of simple mathematics.

In cricket I think it’s more the fact that captains have so much more to think about on the field than other players - I seem to remember various past captains describing batting towards the end of an innings when they are already thinking about what strategy they are going to use on the field, or bowling the opposition out quickly and having very little time to prepare for opening the batting. We’ve already mentioned in this thread about having Eoin Morgan as a specialist captain in the Test side, Brearley-esque, and you could argue that England have the all-rounders right now to make it work - but they’ve not gone for it, so if not now, when?

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I don’t think Morgan would come into the Test side for a one-off to captain - there’s no suggestion at all the Root won’t be captain when he returns for the next time.

England making a better fist of things after the early loss of Sibley. WI bowling well, but they’ve got through to an early tea without losing anything further.

647

Sorry, I didn’t mean to imply Morgan should come in for one Test, that wouldn’t make any sense from a leadership point of view - I meant that when Root seemed to be struggling with his batting, there was a reasonable argument to take the captaincy off him so he could focus on that, and in the absence of many other candidates bringing Morgan into the Test side mainly for his captaincy seemed worth considering. But hopefully Root has sorted that out now - we shall see.

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I am probably guilty of confirmation bias because for each of those examples that you mention, I can fire back Bobby Moore, Bobby Charlton, Maradona, Bryan Robson (who was gradually revealed to be tactically bereft) and so on. I don’t think simply being a pro is the marker I am looking for - nowadays, with the exception of the likes of Mourinho, being a former pro is simply an entry qualification. It’s “were you a great player”. My understanding of Ferguson was that he was going to be a decent player, but not a world beater and then got injured.

Agreed that there is a venn diagram issue here nevertheless. I would imagine that overlap is going to shrink even further going forward. If you’re a genius level footballer, you earn so much money that going into management afterwards is not required to earn a living. You have to be as driven as a Guardiola or a Zidane probably.

Ninja’d for the below but I think the general point still stands.

On the matter at hand, I don’t think that there is any space for a specialist captain in cricket anymore. The game is so numbers driven, that if you’re not contributing you get chucked out quickly. In your example, who would you drop to play Morgan as a specialist captain? He’s not an opener, so not one of them (since none of the middle order can realistically step up to that spot either and we’ve had the devil’s own time trying to find openers anyway). You could make Root play 3 and drop Denly but Root’s performance level at 3 is worse than it is at 4 and you can make a coherent case for playing your best bat where he’s most comfortable. Shifting Stokes at 5? No - since he’s now in a slot that allows him to have greater impact on the innings there, rather than coming in at 6. Drop Pope? Can’t see it, following SA, and he, if anyone, is the probably long term solution at 3, should he bed in properly to test cricket. All other slots for Morgan, non-starters.

I still think you should pick your best side and then pick your captain. I then come back to what I have moaned about numerous times before - central contracts have generally been good, but prevent international players from playing enough county cricket to learn how to captain at a lower level. Result being most England captains in the last 20 odd years are learning how to do it whilst on the job. Don’t know how you fix this but this is why I think we routinely look at England’s captains and think “what are you doing?” - I don’t think it a surprise that England’s best captains over the last 20 years have had very strong backroom staffs (Fletcher, Flower) who are probably picking up some of the slack re: planning.

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In any case, it’s now tea. England are 35-1.

Burns is someone I think about from a captaincy point of view. Done it at Surrey, won the county championship, never going to be the best player in the side. If, and it’s still an if, he cements his place in the side, he would probably be a good candidate. What is happening in this match that Root is missing seems to suggest England will definitely go to Stokes after Root though, so…

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Maybe, but I think Root will tour Australia as captain barring injury or catastrophic decline, and there’s a lot of time between now and then. If Root loses in Australia, we may well look for a new captain, and if Burns has settled himself in he may well, with his extra experience, get the nod.

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I think Root is a given to get to the next Ashes, as you say, unless something goes wrong.

It’s bloody raining again.

652

I hope continuing this little hijack can be forgiven on the basis there isn’t a great deal of interest happening on the field right now.

As usual, we largely agree and you have more knowledge and experience to bring to bear (though please don’t use Maradona as an example of anything other than how to be a fuckwit :)). I do think it’s largely a case of there being even fewer elite managers than elite players, so perhaps it’s more surprising that anybody at all gets to be both (just thought of another couple of examples - Beckenbauer and Deschamps - who, in support of this sentence, are notable as the only two people to win the World Cup as player and manager. Although I’m not sure Deschamps was in the same class as Moore, Charlton, Beckenbauer, and Robson as a player). Zidane of course is motivated by unfinished business. Don’t know what motivates Guardiola but there is still time for him to crash and burn, Mourinho-style.

Back to cricket and you are of course right that you can’t make a good case for dropping anybody for Morgan. I think perhaps when we last discussed it, our collective batting was at a bit of a nadir and with any opener we tried struggling to average in double figures, you could perhaps have made a case for sticking Morgan at number 1, he might score a quick 30 or if not he’d have plenty of time to consider field placements at least :). We can certainly hope about Burns and/or that Stokes takes on the mantle with aplomb - clearly he has leadership qualities but it remains to be seen if the fallout from his catastrophic error of judgement in my hometown a couple of years ago has tempered the rougher edges of his character.

You also make a good point about the backroom - given a lot of captaincy is done off the field, that seems like a sensible area for them to focus on.

Back to the matter at hand - does anyone know why Cricinfo are listing the England side in this rather strange order?

1 Burns
2 Sibley
3 Denly
4 Stokes
5 Anderson
6 Archer
7 Bess
8 Wood
9 Buttler
10 Crawley
11 Pope

653

I think perhaps when we last discussed it, our collective batting was at a bit of a nadir and with any opener we tried struggling to average in double figures,

Yes, the Jennings years, the Roy years, the Robson/Lyth/Hales/nearest warm body years. I don’t know whether we’re necessarily out of them yet either…

I’ve noticed that with Cricinfo too before the lockdown, usually on the PSL scorecards - it tends to sort itself out as the players come in and the batting order becomes solidified but don’t know what is actually driving this.

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Burns is on 999 runs - assuming he eventually scores another run, he will become the first English opening bat to get to 1000 runs since Cook.

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Windies very good this morning and taken 3 quickish wickets. Currently 72-4.

All three batsmen (Denly, Burns and Crawley) guilty of poor footwork in the face of good bowling. All three didn’t get their front foot anywhere near the line of the ball and got done by a nip back. Burns was set up well but didn’t get it right in the end, reading the line out of the hand. All three were good bowling in the end but defence not tight enough either.

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Yeah - in one sense I don’t want to be too critical because these guys have had no time in the middle all summer so a bit of poor form is to be expected; on the other hand, this feels very familiar as a good bowling unit exploits known technical weaknesses in our top order.

657

I’m willing to give some latitude, for as Stan suggests, they’ve not played much cricket in the lead in to this. Still, this score and the prolonged absence of cricket has me thinking - much like when Apu gets shot when he goes back to working at the Kwik-E-Mart in The Simpsons - “ah, the searing kiss of losing half our wickets for fewer than 100 runs, how I’ve missed you”.

England are seemingly always worse than 100 for 4/5. In this sense, whether they have match time or not, seems irrelevant to the outcome.

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The implications of this entirely accurate observation are quite something.

If practice is not a critical factor in our ability to reach, say, 120-1, then that leaves something much more deep-seated - a mental block about the value of defence, or simply ineradicable technical faults. It seems quite plausible that a player with a bad habit could simply reinforce that through match time against bowlers who can’t quite exploit it, leaving it built in to his game and waiting to be exploited. I think we’ve spoken before about how the push for World Cup victory meant we lost focus on Test skills: what is it batsmen are incentivsed to focus on in their game? It’s not “whatever happens, I’m going to face 100 balls today”.

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That last sentence is why there has been a little cult of Denly built up - he is one of the few who seems to go out of his way to take up 100 balls. He averages around 30 which isn’t really good enough, but he’s arguably doing a good job in soaking up pressure and allowing later batsmen to see more tired bowlers and older balls.

I think it inarguable that there is something wrong with development of red ball batsmen in England. I do think that the leap from county to international has possibly never been bigger. Not because of the quality of the players per se (I think the 90s had many better Test match bowlers than the current crop) but because the analysis level that goes into the game is so deep and easy to produce that you can spot flaws very quickly and work plans to exploit them. You’ve only got to see what Sky are doing on TV, picking apart (to take a recent example) Sibley within 2 innings of his debut, showing what he had to fix. It’s got to the point where someone like Rassie Van Der Dussen was spotted sitting just out of camera shot, listening to Nasser Hussain take his technique apart on the SA tour, and when asked why, he just said “he’s got good analysis, it’s worth listening to what he’s got to say”.

The upshot is the technical flaws that past players might have got away with for a while (before enough of the world had seen the player in question play) quickly get exposed.

In an idle hour, I went through England’s test innings since the 1/1/2015. Had to do it by hand, since my web scraping and coding skills are in development (shall we say), so these figures are doubtless out in some measure but they’ll be close enough.

By my reckoning England have been 100-5 or worse in around 17% of their innings since the start of 2015.

They’ve been 75-4 or worse in about 24% of their innings since the start of 2015.

These figures obviously overlap a bit. They also are hard cut offs; having looked at the scorecards, this hides several, running into the tens, of instances where England have been 80 or 90 for 4, or 100-130 for 5. However, it also doesn’t take into account match situation (they’ve been skittled out on 5th day pitches for instance, and on the odd occasion have been trying to set up a target, so chucked the bat around). I also have no idea what the figures are for other countries. These figures though seem bad on their face just from the point of view of basic probabilities.

So, in short and aware of the caveats, in a 4 match series, you should be counting on getting through England’s top order for basically bugger all at least once. It probably means that you can count on getting a test match off them per series due to their failings with the bat. That England have even managed to win some of these matches where they have been shot out is testament to the quality of some of the bowling that they’ve managed to put out. This is a fragile team though and has been for some time.

England now 157-8. The bowlers are going to have to do some serious work. First with the bat and then with the ball.

660

204 all out at tea. Potentially handy lower order runs from Bess in particular.

England are going to have to make significant inroads tonight I think - the weather is due to sharpen up into the weekend, so overhead conditions likely to be less helpful for seam bowling.

661

Good work. And yes, caveats aside, that’s pretty damning. The flipside (I’m not asking you to do it!) is how often have they been better than 100-1? These scores aren’t balanced out by the top 25% of performances being as dramatically good, if you see what I mean.

Great stat on Holder from the Guardian OBO: he has 7 5-fors, 6 of those came in his last ten matches. Not all of which were against England.

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Well, there’s all kinds of situational stuff knocking around there too. England, for instance, put up 400 in their first innings a few times in India on their last tour. Superficially, those scores seem great - certainly by comparison to what they’ve achieved on average. But when they put up 400+, India put up 600+ which suggests that England were short of what should have been achieved.

So yeah, I agree, they’re probably not outweighing their bad scores with proportionately equivalent good scores but even their apparently good scores might not be “good”. The same criticism, of course, could be levelled at my look at their “weak” scores above.

England have been caught in interviews, particularly with Ed Smith, talking about weighted averages - using these to defend the likes of Denly who haven’t scored big on the conventional figures that you can get off statsguru or running through databases, arguing that his 30 is actually worth (making a number up for myself) 60 if you take into account whatever factors they’re using for weighting the averages. Problem with this is how opaque this is: I can’t find much that says what they’re using in their weighted averages, and they’re not revealing anything publicly, as they view it as a competitive advantage (much in the way baseball analytics is apparently progressing far beyond what is publicly available if you happen to be working for an MLB stats department). I’d love to know more about this though, as it would really help to understand some of their decision making and why they are persisting with players who, on the evidence of what we can see in the “normal” stats, are not contributing to what would traditionally make up a winning Test match batting line up.