Cricket 2.0

by Tim Wigmore

  Still, even this chastening experience did nothing to deter England from embracing the IPL with ever more gusto. The new Future Tours Programme, from 2020, was planned to minimise England’s internationals in May – thereby making England’s players available for the entirety of the tournament, and hence far more attractive to franchises. Counties – even Surrey, who generated so much cash from home T20s that they were by far the wealthiest – no longer tried to prevent their players joining the IPL, even as replacements in the final days before the county season began. County cricket in April and May soon became, in effect, played only by those not deemed good enough to win an IPL deal.

  In 2016, Sam Billings entered the auction at Strauss’s encouragement but received such a low fee – Rs 30 lakhs (approximately £31,000) – that, when taking into account reimbursing his county Kent, Billings was losing money from his IPL experience. Strauss used the ECB’s coffers to reimburse Billings. Where once the ECB dissuaded their players from taking part in the IPL, now it actively paid them to do so, such was the haste with which England’s attitudes towards the competition were transformed.

  Billings had initially entered at the lowest possible auction price for an overseas player. Unaware that the ECB would reimburse him, he was content to make an overall loss from his contract if it meant being part of the IPL – even if he wouldn’t get a chance to play. ‘So the technicality was I was on very much the lowest base price for a capped player but because of the current payments I had to pay back to Kent I think I made probably £7,500 those two years so I was essentially going for free compared to everyone else,’ Billings said. ‘I just thought it was a priceless opportunity and I think a lot of the time people just see the dollar signs of going to the IPL and actually it is far more than that.’

  It wasn’t only the IPL that England embraced. The English season may have clashed with the IPL but it didn’t clash with any other southern hemisphere leagues and quickly English players became regular features in the leagues around the world as well, notably Australia’s Big Bash and the Pakistan Super League.

  England’s acceptance of foreign T20 leagues had been driven by Strauss’s desire to improve results on the field. Yet the shift in policy represented a tacit acknowledgement of the balance of power off it as well. Blocking or discouraging English players from appearing in leagues, particularly those who weren’t centrally contracted by England – and therefore on considerably smaller county contracts – was no longer viable. If counties refused permission to players appearing in foreign leagues they risked losing them to counties who would not block their participation. It was the free market in action.

  After Strauss’s appointment, the number of English players in major T20 leagues snowballed. Before 2015, an average of 12 English players per year appeared in major T20 leagues; since 2015, an average of 35 have. This reflected a new virtuous cycle for England’s white-ball cricket. As more England players got picked in the IPL, so England’s limited overs cricket improved; and as England’s limited overs cricket improved, so more England players got picked in the IPL.

  The extent of the transformation in attitudes towards short-format cricket was distilled by England announcing a new eight-team city-based competition in April 2018. After years of machinations with the counties the ECB finally forced through change, opting not for a new T20 competition but a new 100-ball per innings game with the first season to be played in the year 2020. In a saturated market, it amounted to an ostentatious attempt to seek a point of difference, rather than devise another competition that would inevitably be seen as an IPL-lite. Once they had railed against the IPL and what it represented. Now, England created a competition that sought to extend the logic of the IPL – the brevity of games, the concentration of talent, and the fusing of sport and entertainment – even further.

  ***

  The noise rose from the pavilion like a rising tide before engulfing the ground in a flood. It started in the Long Room of the pavilion where the members turned to see Ben Stokes and Jos Buttler walking out to bat for the Super Over. As they emerged on to the steps and into the light the noise spread to the Allen and Warner Stands to the left and right of the pavilion, down the Grand Stand on one side and through the Tavern and Mound Stands on the other. A cacophony of fervour greeted England’s batsmen as they marched out into the evening sun once more.

  It had been the most remarkable day of cricket that the world’s oldest ground – or perhaps even any ground – had ever seen. The 2019 50-over World Cup final between hosts England and New Zealand had been tied; nothing could separate the teams across 100 overs of cricket. The result would be decided by a Super Over – cricket’s equivalent of a penalty shootout and the first of its kind to decide a 50-over match.

  There was a dreamlike quality to events on that July day. A mid-morning shower had seen puddles collect around the Mound Stand which stood at the bottom of the iconic Lord’s slope. By 7.00 p.m., after nine hours of enthralling cricket, those puddles had long since evaporated in the haze of a golden summer afternoon.

  England’s path to this moment began when Strauss, Bayliss and Morgan resolved to treat ODIs less like short Test matches, and more like elongated T20s. In their first multi-match series after the 2015 World Cup, against Brendon McCullum’s New Zealand – who had just reached the World Cup final with a buccaneering approach that inspired Morgan – England packed their team with T20 hitters such as Jason Roy, Alex Hales, Ben Stokes, Buttler and Morgan and attacking bowlers such as Chris Jordan and Adil Rashid.

  In the first match of the series England posted their highest ever total – 408 for 9 – and racked up three more scores of over 300 to win the series. This was a radically new approach.

  ‘A lot of it was trying to do something different,’ recalled Morgan. ‘Everything we’d been a part of for the previous four years was so dated and it actually wasn’t that fun to play that brand of cricket. It was very much correlated with Test match cricket at the time and batting long and cashing in at the end. Which was great but we’d get to a score where the opposition would easily chase it down and we wouldn’t have enough on the board.

  ‘We didn’t ask too much of the players. We said we were going to give them a longer period of time selected in the team even if they made mistakes; as long as they bought into what we were trying to do they would continue to be selected so that reinforced trust when it happened and that created a nice feel around the group.

  ‘When the guys posted 408 in the first game against New Zealand the feeling surrounding that innings that we put together was incredible. And the guys can always relate back to that and it was a nice benchmark to have.’

  The combination of England’s open-border policy to foreign leagues, the renewed emphasis on white-ball cricket and aggressive selection policy produced dramatic results. In 2016 England reached the T20 World Cup final, only losing to West Indies in an extraordinary final over; in 2017 England appeared on track to win the Champions Trophy only to suffer a shock defeat to Pakistan in the semi-finals. Between March 2017 and the 2019 World Cup England’s only defeat in an ODI series was in a one-off game against Scotland. In May 2018 they reached the summit of the ODI rankings.

  The contours of England’s approach were shaped by T20: their bowlers attacked and looked for wickets, while their batsmen were infused with a spirit of audacity. In 44 years of ODI cricket up until the end of the 2015 World Cup, England scored more than 300 34 times; in the four years after the 2015 World Cup they did so an astonishing 44 times – including scaling 400 four times, which they had never done before. Their highest total of 481 for 6 against Australia in 2018 broke their own world record of 444 for 3 against Pakistan set two years before. Ten of England’s fastest 11 ODI hundreds of all time came after the end of the 2015 World Cup with Buttler’s 360-degree scoring matched by the power of Hales, Roy, Morgan and Jonny Bairstow.

  ‘T20 has allowed you to accept that eight or nine an over is okay to be able to chase it down as a run
rate. So the impact that has had in 50-over cricket is massive,’ Morgan observed. ‘It’s changed the mindset in batting in particular because you can now chase any score in any format.’

  Once England – unfairly in the view of their white-ball analyst Nathan Leamon – had been derided for their use of data. After the 2015 World Cup debacle, Strauss commissioned Leamon to research how previous World Cups had been won. He found that victorious sides tended to be very experienced – which encouraged England to identify players at the start of the World Cup cycle and sticking with them. On the field, batting strike rate – how quickly teams scored – was the single biggest factor that separated winners from other sides. Leamon said this work ‘strongly buttressed’ the ideas of Morgan and Bayliss.

  The rule changes after the 2015 World Cup – with only four men outside the circle from the 11th to the 40th over, but five for the last ten – ‘perfectly suited’ attacking with the bat early as Morgan envisaged, rather than the backdated approach England had previously favoured. ‘You had a 50-over innings where the best and easiest time to score was the first ten overs, then the next 30 and then the last ten was structurally the hardest time to score quickly,’ Leamon explained.

  Rather than being inhibited by data, Morgan found it liberating, and an aid to the buccaneering style of cricket he wanted England to play, in both ODI and T20 cricket. ‘Guys have become better at taking risks,’ Morgan observed. ‘There is stuff you think as captain that might work but you might not pull the trigger on it unless it is backed up either with another opinion or some data and data has helped that decision-making process massively because if it backs that up then you are less hesitant to go to it.’ Before the 2016 T20 World Cup final, Leamon uncovered Chris Gayle’s relative weakness against off spin, encouraging Morgan to get Joe Root to bowl the second over; Root took two wickets, including Gayle’s, in his first three balls.

  From football teams who are behind in matches not making attacking substitutions early enough, to ice hockey teams who are losing not pulling the goalkeeper early enough, sports sides have routinely played in a more conservative, risk-averse way than data suggests is optimal. Paradoxically, given the previous image of data in cricket as stultifying the team, Morgan used data to embolden his side.

  ‘People talk about taking risks all the time and T20 cricket being so risky. And naturally you don’t take as high a risk as you should and as data tells you to,’ Morgan explained. ‘Every decision in T20 cricket should be an aggressive decision. It should be to try and get a hundred, it should be to try and take a wicket.

  ‘It goes against human reactions. We have a safe nature. When you peg back you feel safe. But you should go the other way. That’s where data is really good.’

  Morgan also used data to provide clarity in high-octane situations in matches. ‘One of the main challenges in T20 is being able to make a clear-cut decision very quickly,’ he said. ‘I actually think one of the hardest jobs is trying to juggle your bowlers and identifying which is the moment to try and bowl them.

  ‘Where it has evolved for me probably more as captain, is identifying pressure times in the game that I might not have done in the past. So keeping an eye on the par score, bowling out your main bowlers by the 16th over so you are still in the game, trusting your [other] guys to bowl at the lower order. As a batsman, learning to trust the data. If somebody bowls wide yorkers and that’s their go-to the whole time, you trust it and you account for that whereas in the past you might have needed two balls to see if he was going to bowl wide yorkers. I think it has evolved massively.’

  England’s approach to data was to use Leamon and then Morgan as filters, only relaying to other players a few of the most pertinent findings that they could use in matches. ‘There’s no point giving guys information if it’s not going to impact their performance,’ Morgan said. ‘We don’t sit in long meetings and go through everything. That’s down to myself, the coach and the analyst. And we do a lot of work on it.’

  England also used a ‘wins above replacement’ model developed by Leamon as a tool to aid their selection. In T20s and ODIs, this tool allowed England to substitute one player for another, run thousands of simulations of the game and find out which XI would give England a better chance of victory according to the model. This was particularly useful when gauging whether to make a change that wasn’t like-for-like – replacing a specialist batsman with an all-rounder, say – and would change the balance of the side. ‘Over a period of time you can see if your opinion on a player is actually backed up,’ Morgan explained. ‘Does he get runs in big games? Does he get runs when wickets are down early? Does he get runs against the opposition’s best bowlers? When you are coming to World Cup selection you need to know what guys can produce against better teams so it’s not a bad model.’

  To Bayliss, T20 provided the impetus for the 50-over side to bat with a level of consistent belligerence that was unparalleled in ODI history. ‘Fifty-over cricket influenced Test cricket years ago when it first came in: the scoring rates went up, the fielding standards rose. I think T20 cricket has taken the 50-over game to another level as well as we’ve seen recently with the number of big scores.’

  For the World Cup, the final benefit to England’s team that T20 brought lay in a brilliant fast bowler named Jofra Archer. Archer, born in Barbados to an English mother, only fulfilled his qualification period in May 2019. He had only played 14 50-over games in professional cricket before his call-up. But England’s selectors placed faith in Archer’s consistent success on the T20 circuit where his pace, bounce and a pinpoint yorker had dominated in the IPL and beyond.

  Although slow pitches in the tournament complicated England’s path to the final, their aggressive batting was at the forefront of their campaign. England plundered 397 against Afghanistan in the group stage with Morgan hitting an ODI record 17 sixes in a single innings. Attacking stroke play from Roy and Bairstow was instrumental in crucial victories against India and New Zealand in the group stage and a thumping victory over Australia in the semi-final. In that game Rashid took three middle order wickets with his leg spin; though no English leg-spinner had previously taken more than five wickets in ODIs, Morgan identified Rashid as integral to England’s ODI and T20 plans after the 2015 World Cup.

  After seven weeks, a white-ball revolution with T20 cricket at its heart culminated in the most distilled format possible: a Super Over. Where previously Strauss had cited that 38 of the 44 semi-finalists in the 2015 World Cup had played in the IPL, now nine of England’s XI for the 2019 final also had IPL experience, and so did two of their four non-playing squad members. All of England’s 15-man squad had played in a major overseas T20 league, compared with just six in the 2015 squad.

  England’s two most successful T20 exports were Stokes and Buttler. In the 2017 IPL auction, Stokes was sold to Rajasthan Royals for £1.7 million. The following year he was joined at the Royals by Buttler – signed for £490,000 – who had previously been with Mumbai.

  In the final, Stokes and Buttler hauled England back into the match with a 110-run partnership, before returning to face the Super Over together. Thanks to T20, Buttler had first-hand experiences of Super Overs: he had batted in one for England against Pakistan in 2015 and for Mumbai Indians against Gujarat Lions in 2017. On both occasions Buttler finished on the winning team.

  While Lord’s creaked under the burden of expectation, Buttler and Stokes retained their equipoise. In the Super Over both men each hit perfectly placed boundaries, laid a bat on every delivery and scampered desperately between the wickets to take England to 15 from their six balls.

  After two of England’s IPL stars helped them to become favourites, now Morgan turned to the side’s third proven IPL performer to finish the job. Archer was the youngest and least experienced member of the team – 24, and just 73 days into his international career. But while Archer was a relative newcomer to the international stage he had played more BBL and IPL matches than all but three of the 22 play
ers in the match.

  When a marginal first-ball wide was followed by a high-risk knuckle ball dispatched into the crowd by Jimmy Neesham, New Zealand required seven from the last four balls. But two yorkers and one slower ball bouncer left New Zealand requiring two from the last delivery.

  The ball from Archer was full and angled into the pads. Martin Guptill squeezed it out on to the leg side and set off for two. Fielding, which had played such a prominent role in the frantic last half an hour, was once again under the spotlight. Roy charged in from midwicket and made a perfect clean pick-up – only two balls previously his fumble had turned one into two. Roy’s throw was wayward but Buttler had the presence of mind to collect the ball and break the stumps in one clean and glorious motion. Guptill’s desperate dive left him metres short of the crease.

  Astoundingly, for the second time in the day New Zealand had tied with England: both teams were level on 15 runs apiece from the Super Over. England only won because of the controversial tiebreaker: they had scored 26 boundaries to New Zealand’s 17. Yet, however unfathomable these fraught final moments, it was entirely in keeping with England’s revolution that, even in a scrappy, low-scoring game, their ultimate triumph should come after scoring more boundaries than their opponents.

  NINE

  SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST

  ‘India watches Indian cricketers. India doesn’t watch cricket’

  Sanjog Gupta, executive vice-president, Star TV Network

  At the Bvlgari Hotel London, a five-star hotel on the edge of Hyde Park, in June 2017, Brendon McCullum declared, ‘All of us are unashamed T20 mercenaries now.’

  McCullum, who had retired from a brilliant international career the previous year, was exactly the sort of player coveted by T20 leagues around the world. Signing him, along with a raft of other elite players, was seen as a harbinger of good times to come for South Africa’s brand-new T20 franchise tournament. Having the launch in London was designed to affirm that this competition was the Global T20 League, as its name declared. It was envisaged that combining many of the best players in the world with several Indian owners, who would drive interest in India, would create a league with global appeal.