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Why can’t we rate fielding?
By Jonathan Liew 4 months ago, 6 Comments »
Musing over how Wally Hammond might have handled running around the boundary to cut off a Misbah-ul-Haq shovel sweep got me thinking about fielding.
We’re often told that unlike batting and bowling, fielding and wicket-keeping can’t be expressed in simple numbers. Great wicket-keepers, we’re told, drop catches others wouldn’t even reach. Pietersen (6 foot 4) can stop balls Bell (5 foot 10) can’t. How can you measure boundary saves? Or run-outs? Or fumbles?
Well, why can’t we?
In football, Prozone tracks every movement of a player throughout the game, with and without the ball. Similarly, The Times’s ‘Fink Tank’ logs every touch a player makes and from that deduces the value of that player to the team’s performance. In cricket, we have all the ingredients we need to perform the same calculations.
Take catches, for example. Hawkeye can measure how far a fielder was from the bat at the time the ball was hit, the speed the ball was travelling and how far the fielder had to move to catch the ball. Factor in the player’s height, and that’s pretty much all you need. Sit a couple of mathematicians in a room with a couple of biomechanics experts and you can come up with a formula. Not a perfect formula, obviously, but a start.
Apply a similar system to ground fielding and you should be able to work out when fielders should, on average, be cutting off twos. You could then factor in distance from the stumps and angle with the stumps to compare direct-hit run-outs.
It’s not going to be easy, but imagine the benefits of having a reliable measure by which to compare fielders with each other. It will revolutionise the game. Such a measure will never, of course, be truly objective, but it’s a darn sight better (no pun intended) than the naked eye, which is what we’ve been relying on so far.
So if there are any mathematicians reading this who fancy a project, do get cracking. It took 34 years for cricket to come up with a reliable formula to calculate a rain-adjusted target. With the technology in place, surely we can do better this time.
6 Comments »Duckworth, Lewis, Carib
By Will 2 years ago, mid-September, No Comments; be the first!
Del, protector of the Wisden wallets, rose from his seat this afternoon and jeered “Editorial! Duckworth and Lewis…friends of the West Indies.”
A fervent West Indies fan, he was just slightly pleased at Duck’n'Loo’s calculations which helped them down India in yesterday’s one-dayer. And all that, in spite of 141* from Sachin Tendulkar…on comeback!
No Comments »What has Twenty20 done to D/L?
By Emma 2 years ago, mid-September, 4 Comments »
Another day, another Pro40. Today, though, saw a late season glimpse of Twenty20 batting, after Sky’s televised game from Trent Bridge faced several interruptions. After high winds, lightning and finally an evening drizzle, Warwickshire saw their required total reduced to 124, with some 70 runs to get from just 10.5 overs. Once upon a time, a team would have balked at the sight of a required rate above 6 an over, and the visitors tried their best to suggest this hadn’t changed with the loss of two wickets in as many balls.
These days, however, such recalculations place a strike-rate savvy batting side at an advantage. Whilst I would much rather see a game play on, and wouldn’t know where to start if asked to algebra my way to a better system, Duckworth/Lewis calculations often seem a few runs light on games of significantly reduced length. Nottinghamshire, having rebuilt their innings in their last few overs to place themselves at a competitive total, will feel a little hard done by.
What this result does do is ensure that Nick Knight has played his last domestic one-day game. Having announced his retirement at the end of this season, this final win places Warwickshire safe from relegation. A pity, then, that he lost his wicket for a mere 9 runs, from an ill-advised prod outside off stump.
4 Comments »Cricinfo’s servers are cactus.
By Scott 2 years ago, at the start of February, No Comments; be the first!
India are playing Pakistan, as I noted.. and I can’t access cricinfo at all just now. I saw that they were selling radio streaming, so I guess that must have been more successful then they thought.
Buy more servers, you guys!
India made 328, with Sachin Tendulkar making 100.
This is very annoying for me as I was about to write a post about South Africa’s match against Sri Lanka tomorrow with some interesting facts that I found on Statsguru!
Update- Wow, Pakistan won!
Must have been an interesting game. They are showing highlights on television tomorrow in Australia and I will make a note to see it. Sachin Tendulkar went past 14,000 ODI runs in his innings, the game itself was decided by the Duckworth Lewis method when the light got too bad, and Inzamam was given out obstructing the field!
No Comments »Duckworth Lewis “rules”
By Will 3 years ago, at the end of June, 11 Comments »
If you’re interested, and I doubt you will be, read this for info on how the Duckworth Lewis method is calculated. Only cricket could come up with something this complicated…
11 Comments »