| 
Posts and words
Loading ...
science
Why can’t we rate fielding?
By Jonathan Liew 2 years ago, at the start of March, 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 »