Cricket 2.0

by Tim Wigmore

  Less than three weeks later Tait was in action again, this time against New Zealand in Christchurch. Tait’s first three overs had been excellent – he had taken 2 for 20 on a day when the rest of Australia’s attack had been pummelled by a rampant Brendon McCullum. As Tait stood at the top of his run-up, ready to deliver his fourth and final over, McCullum was 100 not out off just 54 balls.

  McCullum did not see Tait’s pace as a threat to his safety or his wicket. Instead with a short boundary behind him, he saw an opportunity.

  ‘I simply didn’t have the power to hit someone bowling full at 150 kph,’ recalled McCullum. ‘It was all right if he was bowling short because I could cut or pull him. But I didn’t have the power to be able to go down the ground.’

  As Tait reached the crease to deliver the first ball of the 19th over McCullum made a sudden move across his stumps to get in line with the ball and play the most outrageously daring shot: a ramp, over his head. ‘The boundary was short behind me so I recognised that I had to play the shot. If I execute it I’ll get a boundary, if I don’t then I’ll be in trouble. But we need a boundary at this point in time and that was the only way I felt I could get one.’

  Tait had seen him coming and fired the ball wider outside off stump, following McCullum. The ball was now heading straight for McCullum’s chest, who was squatted down low, legs splayed, holding the bat in his hands like a frying pan – grip rotated, bat face up. Tait’s adjustment meant that rather than McCullum just ducking his head out of the way as players typically did with the ramp, he was forced to pull off a remarkable sideways roll, moving his entire body and tumbling away to the off side. Somehow in amongst all this, in a split second moment he had managed to make contact with the ball and such was the pace of the delivery, 150 kph, it flew over the wicketkeeper’s head and all the way for six. ‘On any other day I could have lost all three sticks,’ joked McCullum.

  Three balls later he did it again. Tait had not envisaged McCullum attempting an encore; McCullum made a cleaner connection with a ball 5 kph faster and the ball crashed out of the stadium, bouncing into the car park behind. McCullum smirked; Tait could not help but laugh.

  No two shots better encapsulated the T20 batting revolution quite like those, not necessarily because of the skill involved – although it was extraordinary – but because of what the shots represented. Less than three weeks previously Tait had bowled one of the quickest overs ever recorded; he was the fastest bowler on the planet. But McCullum saw no threat and had the bravery and the imagination to play the most difficult shot in the game, not just once but twice.

  McCullum had made his name way back in 2008 with one of the most significant innings in the history of the game but his impact on T20 went well beyond that heady night in Bangalore. McCullum’s commitment to the T20 game – particularly after he retired from international cricket in 2016 – helped enhance the format’s sporting integrity in a way that many did not believe was possible. To him T20 cricket was not frivolous entertainment but serious business.

  Perhaps no cricketer so embodied the zeitgeist of T20 batting. McCullum’s free-spirited approach paved the way for a seminal shift in the nature of batting. The relationship between bowler and batsman had always been more than simply attack versus defence; it was between the hunter and the hunted. Traditionally, big, tall bowlers, charging in off long run-ups were the ones with the upper hand. But in T20 everything was different. When T20 batsmen were said to be ‘fearless’ it was with reference not to their safety but to losing their wicket. Suddenly it was the hulking batsmen with their huge bats – emboldened by power-hitting techniques, range hitting and the ability to score 360 degrees – that were the ones to be feared. Bowlers were reduced to defensive players with little more than a lump of cork and leather in their hands.

  TWO

  SELLING THE PRINCE

  ‘Numbers don’t lie . . . We’ve got it down to a science now’

  Venky Mysore, chief executive, Kolkata Knight Riders

  ‘Sourav Ganguly?’

  On a sweltering day in 2011 at the ITC Royal Gardenia hotel in Bangalore, Richard Madley, the IPL auctioneer, called out Ganguly’s name. He was one of India’s greatest captains. Perhaps the finest cricketer that West Bengal had ever produced. The Prince of Kolkata.

  ‘That’s former Indian captain Sourav Ganguly . . .’

  Though he had retired from international cricket, Ganguly was still the captain of the Kolkata Knight Riders. And even if, aged 38, his batting and athleticism had both dwindled, Ganguly had a broader worth: enticing sponsors, selling shirts and, through his razzmatazz, getting more people to watch. In the IPL, commercial and cricketing interests were not easily disentangled. And any sporting benefits to KKR in letting Ganguly go brought risks of a commercial backlash.

  ‘That’s Sourav Ganguly, the great Indian batsman . . .’

  There were ten tables in the room, each seating a different IPL team. Yet the focus of those in the room and the millions watching on TV lay squarely on one: Kolkata’s. To have the chutzpah to let Ganguly go, especially when he was going cheap in the auction, risked being a roadblock to getting 60,000 fans through their gates for seven home games.

  ‘I’m asking for 184 lakh for Sourav Ganguly . . .’

  Madley spoke again, an impenetrable auctioneer now given over to sheer confusion about the scene he was presiding over. All he got in return was an eerie silence. It was really true: no one wanted the Prince.

  ***

  A few months earlier, Kolkata had appointed Venky Mysore, an Indian businessman educated in the US, as their new chief executive. Mysore inherited the worst IPL team of the lot. In the first three IPL seasons, KKR had come sixth, eighth and sixth out of eight teams. They were the sole franchise never to reach the play-off stages. These results betrayed a team without a coherent plan.

  Mysore came to the conclusion that, for all his pedigree in longer formats of cricket, Ganguly had simply been left behind by T20; like a silent actor in the new age of talkie films, Ganguly was out of place.

  ‘When Sourav went unsold the nation went quiet,’ the auctioneer Madley recalled. ‘People looked at the Kolkata Knight Riders to say, “How could you?” But that’s market forces for you. Nobody picked him. He’d had his day. He was no longer . . . he represented the past of Indian cricket and the IPL is looking for players to represent the future.’

  Now, 18,000 international runs and feted national status suddenly counted for less than a player’s T20 pedigree, and a strike rate that looked funereal set against those batsmen reared on the new T20 age. Ditching Ganguly represented an embrace of cricketing needs over those of celebrity. Essentially, it was a bet that fans would prefer to watch a winning team than one brimming with ageing glamour. In the trade-off between sporting and commercial goals, KKR had emphatically plumped for sport.

  A huge ‘No Dada, no KKR’ – no Ganguly, no KKR – campaign was launched in Kolkata before the IPL season. Thousands of accompanying leaflets railed against the ‘unjust exclusion’ of Ganguly, and how ‘his glorious career was brought to a sudden halt just because a few businessmen wanted him out.’ While calling on fans to boycott matches, it acclaimed that ‘people are known by the choices they make’.

  ‘There was a lot of sentiment around it – understandably so because he was such an iconic player,’ Mysore recalled. ‘There were people who were extremely unhappy. I don’t know whether they were already KKR fans or were becoming KKR fans . . . People in the city were extremely upset which was completely understandable.’

  In the end a rival IPL team, Pune Warriors, picked up Ganguly as an injury replacement. In 19 games for Pune over two years Ganguly made 318 runs at an average of just 17.67. Worst of all, he made those runs at a strike rate of under 100. Mysore’s clinical, unsentimental approach was right. The fan boycott collapsed. Kolkata did not have Ganguly but, for the first time, they had a team who won more games than they lost. That season, KKR came fourth, out of ten sides, an
d became the first IPL team to record a profit. Ultimately fans wanted to see victories more than they wanted to see Ganguly.

  ***

  Mysore thought of T20 as a new market brimming with basic inefficiencies, believing that notable gains could be made by bringing the same analytical rigour that he had brought to insurance. As a devotee of US sports, he knew the value that shrewd analysis could bring. A study of Major League Baseball analysts by the website FiveThirtyEight found that employing an extra analyst was worth about two extra wins per season to teams. These extra wins would have cost 30 times as much through spending higher salaries on players, showing what a cost-effective way of improving a team analysts can be.

  Such thinking informed Mysore’s decision not to re-sign Ganguly, as well as release other stars like Chris Gayle and Brendon McCullum; indeed, KKR didn’t retain a single player before the 2011 auction. It symbolised a radically different approach to team-building, evoking Pep Guardiola’s decision to dispense with star players Deco and Ronaldinho as soon as he took over as Barcelona manager in 2008.

  Releasing Ganguly was ‘a tough decision to make but it was in the context of a broader strategy. We had to bite the bullet,’ Mysore said. ‘We said let’s go out and build a brand-new team – a new captain, a new team. We basically said that whatever we’d done in the first three years somehow hadn’t worked for KKR. It was a shift in focus from thinking about names to thinking about skills, bearing in mind the conditions that we were going to play in. Our entire strategy was about making sure that we got those skills without really bothering about the names that went with it.’

  KKR made this decision on a unique table in the auction; every other franchise’s table had the team owner on it, but KKR’s had only the management, who were entrusted to do what they were paid for without last-minute meddling. And so Mysore was empowered to bring the same cold, unsentimental approach to choosing a cricket team as he had to his career in insurance.

  ‘You grow up understanding that there is risk everywhere,’ he explained. ‘It’s about being able to understand risk, measure risk and then be in a position where you can hopefully make some intelligent decisions on whether to take those risks or not. That was the upbringing in that business. A lot of it applies here, for sure.’

  Mysore could also glimpse forerunners of what was possible in cricket. Nathan Leamon, the first-ever full-time team analyst employed by an international cricket team, was already using Monte Carlo simulations to map out probable outcomes in Test matches, playing computerised games with different sets of players and varied tactics to inform England’s strategy. Leamon dissected opponents forensically, breaking down the pitch into 20 blocks, of 100cm by 15cm each, and finding the optimal block to target when bowling to each opposing batsman. Famously, he found that Sachin Tendulkar, one of the greatest Test batsmen of all time, rarely scored through the off side at the start of his innings. England nullified Tendulkar’s influence by hanging the ball outside off stump, beat India 4–0, and reached the summit of the world Test rankings in 2011.

  Though international teams played little T20, data also yielded T20 success. In 2010, England won the T20 World Cup, their first-ever global tournament victory in any format. Leamon and data played a crucial role, notably in encouraging the selection of left-armer Ryan Sidebottom over James Anderson, noting how left-armers were particularly effective in T20. Sidebottom picked up ten wickets in the tournament, including wickets in his first two overs against Australia in the final. A few hours later, England lifted the trophy.

  In the early 2000s, as Australia were pushing the boundaries of what was deemed possible, the board enlisted a sports analytics company to study cricket statistics and see if there was a way these could give a fresh edge. The company referred to the sport as ‘the Monster’, such was the sheer volume of data and variables to process.

  In T20, the monster can be tamed. As innings only last 20 overs, it is easier to pre-plan strategy than in the other formats, where scenarios are less predictable. Conditions are also more similar from one T20 game to the next, making comparisons more fertile. Most importantly, as matches are played far more frequently than in the longer forms there is far more data to identify patterns that can lead to a team making better decisions on the pitch. While analysts say that data, for competitions, players or grounds, is superfluous when it is two years out of date, elite T20 players can easily play 50 or more games in that period. And most T20 is played between clubs, rather than countries. Throughout sports history, most leaps in analytics have come from domestic teams.

  ‘It’s the market that drives analysis hardest, because of direct and immediate financial pay-offs for improving your valuing of players,’ Leamon explained. He considered T20 the format most conducive to using data sagaciously – and T20 leagues particularly well suited to using it. ‘A lot of your plans prior to the game go through the game unchanged in T20 cricket.’

  Even in the first chaotic years of the IPL there had been glimpses of shrewd thinking being vindicated. Despite having comfortably the smallest playing budget – £1.8 million, when all other teams were at or near the £2.5 million salary cap – Rajasthan Royals won the inaugural IPL, in 2008; a victory for strategy over financial determinism.

  ‘The only thing unanimous about 2008 was that the Royals had the worst team and would come last,’ remembered Shane Warne, the legendary Australian bowler who was the Royals captain and coach in 2008. Bollywood owners of other teams resembled over-excited children playing fantasy cricket. Royal Challengers Bangalore assembled a formidable Test team, including Rahul Dravid, Shivnarine Chanderpaul, Jacques Kallis, Mark Boucher, Anil Kumble and Dale Steyn, but found that it was ill-suited to T20, and came second last. Perhaps their attitude to the competition was betrayed by Steyn who, at a Cricket South Africa awards dinner, said that ‘the IPL was only four overs a game and it was like a paid holiday; you only had to work hard if you felt like it, which is probably why we finished second last.’ Steyn later said he ‘was trying to be funny and just ended up being stupid’.

  Meanwhile, Rajasthan acted like card counters in a casino. In their XI for each match, teams were only allowed to field four overseas players, so it made little sense to splurge cash on foreigners who might not even play; it was equally illogical to build a team around players who, because of international commitments, would flee before the final stages. And, most of all, they needed to build a team to win T20 matches, not Tests. ‘They are two very different games, requiring very different skills,’ said Manoj Badale, the co-owner of Rajasthan Royals.

  Rajasthan identified their four overseas players – the first of which was Warne, their brilliant captain. ‘I was grateful for the opportunity because in the other seven franchises you had Tendulkar, Sehwag, Ganguly, Dravid, Laxman, Kumble and Dhoni, so all the big Indian names, and then there was me, a retired player who hadn’t played for 18 months. The other teams had all their coaches too and I was captain and coach as well.’

  Warne was joined by fellow Australian Shane Watson, an all-rounder whose skills were ideally suited to T20 yet was among the cheapest overseas players; Sohail Tanvir, an unorthodox left-arm pace bowler from Pakistan; and Graeme Smith, South Africa’s captain and opening batsman. This quartet were selected together in almost every game, allowing team cohesion to develop and ensuring each player was clear about their role in the side. This shrewd foreign recruitment was married to signing Indian players far better suited to T20 than other formats – notably Yusuf Pathan, an explosive hitter who ended the season with a strike rate of 179, and Swapnil Asnodkar, an unknown impish opening batsman with no care for the reputations of the opening bowlers he faced.

  ‘Halfway through that tournament we had something special,’ recalled Warne. ‘Every now and again you get involved with a group of people, whether it is work or sport, and there is just a little bit of magic. You can’t quite put your finger on what it is and we just had a bit of magic in our group. Everyone knew their roles and eve
ryone got along.’

  The poorest team in the IPL, who played in the most remote area and had the fewest number of overseas players of any side, turned out to be easily the best. In the process they provided a hint of how smart, analytical thinking could overcome the logic of financial determinism in T20 cricket, leaving behind rivals more focused upon Bollywood, cheerleaders and the razzmatazz of the IPL than the actual cricket.

  Rajasthan’s victory also imbued the IPL with an essential sense of sporting integrity. ‘To then go on and win it as we did gave the IPL credibility because everyone loves the underdog story like Leicester with the footy,’ remarked Warne. ‘The Royals were a great story and you combine that with Brendon McCullum scoring 158 in the first game, suddenly people are thinking, “This IPL is pretty cool!” That first year was something special.’

  KKR’s tactics had been altogether less enlightened. Yet at least this history of failure liberated Mysore to adopt a radically new approach to the auction, and building the entire team. Gut instincts had failed KKR; instead Mysore embraced numbers.

  Mysore empowered A.R. Srikkanth, who was appointed performance and strategies analyst for KKR in 2009, and elevated him to the core of the team’s decision-making. These two bespectacled outsiders – united by their rigorous academic training, belief in numbers and their distrust of the sport’s tropes and received wisdom – would help transform the sport forever.

  ***

  As chief executive, Mysore sought to bring order to the anarchy of the auction. This was particularly vital as 2011 was a ‘big auction’ – almost every player would enter the auction, and franchises would have the option of signing them for three years.