IN FEBRUARY 2005 the Australian and New Zealand cricket teams gathered in Auckland for an experiment. This was the first men’s international match played in a new format, Twenty20, in which each team has 120 balls to score as many runs as possible. It is intended to be fast and furious; hit out or get out. The concept had been dreamt up several years earlier as a way to make cricket more appealing to broadcasters and younger fans. The early games had been treated as a novelty. The organisers had put hot tubs on the edge of the field and hired pop bands to entertain the crowd, as if they didn’t quite trust the quality of the sport on offer. The same spirit carried over into Auckland. The New Zealand players wore wigs and grew retro moustaches. One of the Australians bowled a ball underarm, echoing a famous controversy from 24 years earlier. The Australian captain, Ricky Ponting, said Twenty20 was “difficult to play seriously”.
It took the intervention of an Indian businessman, Lalit Modi, to get the balance between sport and entertainment right. He saw huge promise in the Twenty20 format and set out to build an annual domestic club tournament. Over the course of 2007, he created a set of teams – Chennai Super Kings, Mumbai Indians, Delhi Daredevils – and persuaded members of the Bollywood and business elite to buy them. Modi dangled generous wages in front of some of the world’s best players and put them into a US-style draft system. He sold the television rights to the tournament for an astronomical sum. The following year, the Indian Premier League (IPL) was born. It was an instant hit with players, fans and investors alike.
However, Twenty20 also posed some difficult questions for cricket. The new format was a direct challenger to cricket’s more familiar five-day Test matches and one-day games. Some national governing bodies, including the England and Wales Cricket Board, sought to stop their players from playing in the IPL, fearful that Twenty20 would sweep away all before it. In response, several players cut short their international careers to cash in on the burgeoning Twenty20 circuit. While the authorities and players were fighting over their availability for Twenty20, less attention was being paid to what skills the format required. What Twenty20 was missing was numbers and analysis. But one man had figured this out. He just needed to get his hands on enough data.
IN 2013 A British businessman, Aidan Cooney, was preparing to sell his sports-data company, Opta, for a life-changing sum of money. Cooney had bought Opta in 2002 and positioned it at the forefront of an information revolution in football. He realised that there was more going on in a match than was captured by official statistics, so Opta began counting different types of action and analysing them. Then it started selling its findings to clubs and broadcasters who were hungry to understand the game at a deeper level. As he was preparing to hand over the firm, a couple of colleagues persuaded Cooney that there was an opportunity to do in cricket what Opta had achieved in football. Because cricket consists of a series of individual plays, it could be broken down and analysed more easily than football, they argued. Cooney agreed and in 2014 he launched a new company, named CricViz.
To offer something new, Cooney realised he needed unprecedented amounts of data. To help him find it, he pinched one of his Opta analysts, Phil Oliver, who is now CricViz’s managing director. Oliver believes CricViz has the most comprehensive and sophisticated cricket database in the world. He explains its design as a four-storey stack, with each layer adding more detail. The base layer is a set of complete scorecards. This gave the firm the number of runs scored, wickets taken and catches held and the overall results of every documented match since Test matches began in the nineteenth century. But this was just the start. Searching for the next layer, Oliver struck gold. He found an Australian cricket statistician, Charles Davis, who had been painstakingly translating physical scorebooks into a ball-by-ball digital archive as a hobby. Oliver flew to Melbourne and pleaded with Davis to share it. Davis acquiesced. Now CricViz knew not only the results of every match, but some of what had happened with each ball.
Next, Oliver licensed a data feed of information that Opta had been recording for years on fielding positions, shots played by batsmen, the types of ball delivered by bowlers. Finally, it added what OIiver describes as “the magic ingredient”: data from two ball-tracking systems, Hawk-Eye and Virtual Eye, that have been logging cricket matches for 20 years. This stack means that for any single ball in international or major club cricket in the past generation CricViz knows who the bowler was; the sort of ball they delivered; where it bounced; how it moved in the air; if the batsman played a shot and what kind; if any runs were scored and where; and if a wicket was taken and how. Another of CricViz’s early collaborators, England team analyst Nathan Leamon, used this data to build models to suggest how teams might perform in the future based on previous outcomes from the past.
Initially, Cooney thought CricViz would be a fun tool for fans to learn more about the game as they watched it. The first CricViz product was a mobile app, while an accompanying Twitter feed posted interesting nuggets of information. But broadcasters quickly got wind of what they were doing. Channel Nine in Australia bought access to the database for the Ashes series between Australia and England in 2015. Oliver realised that the broadcaster needed a middleman to pass information to the commentators, so he spent the series huddled in a production truck parked at the grounds. Other contracts soon followed, including with the game’s governing body, the International Cricket Council, and Sky, which holds the domestic rights to England’s international matches.
Cricket fans first took note of CricViz because of WinViz, an algorithm built by Leamon that takes account of the players, the venue and the state of the match to run a series of simulations to determine the most likely outcome. It then ascribes each team a percentage chance of winning the game. First updated and published on Twitter, it has been incorporated by Sky and other broadcasters into their coverage of all types of international cricket. A former England captain, Mike Atherton, who now commentates for Sky, is a fan. “I'll say to myself, 'Who's winning this game?', and then I'll price it up in my mind and check it against WinViz to see how it compares. The interesting thing is that most of the time I’ll be within two or three percentage points, but when I’m massively out of sync, that's the starting point for a conversation”.
Cooney chuckles about the success of WinViz, which he describes as “incredibly basic”, but acknowledges that its simplicity is why it found favour. “It is really just a reflection of the betting odds, but the broadcasters bloody love to disagree with it”.
AS CRICVIZ WAS finding its feet, a politics student at Cardiff University, Freddie Wilde, received a direct message on Twitter. Wilde grew up with cricket. His father, Simon, is a well-respected cricket journalist who took his son on his first tour of Australia when he was a young boy. Wilde was determined to find his niche within cricket and had built up a large Twitter following by posting regularly about Twenty20. The sender of this particular message hadn’t added a photo to their account, so Twitter used one of its generic egg images instead. It wasn’t a promising start, but Wilde clicked through anyway. The message was from Aidan Cooney and he was asking for help. Cricket analytics seemed like a niche worth exploring. Wilde finished his course and went to work for CricViz.
Although he is still only in his mid-20s, Wilde is now one of the leading exponents of Twenty20. His Twitter following has grown to more than 58,000. Together with another young journalist, the Daily Telegraph’s Tim Wigmore, he wrote Cricket 2.0, which won Wisden’s Cricket Book of the Year award in 2020. Partly this is because Twenty20 belongs to his generation. “We understand Twenty20 as much, if not more, than most commentators and broadcasters”, he says. Analysing a game with Wilde is a mind-expanding experience. He talked at length about a recent match in the IPL, in which Rajasthan Royals batted first and built a huge score of 220 runs for the loss of just three wickets. Their opponents, Sunrisers Hyderabad, wilted, and could only muster 165-8 in response. It seemed a straightforward thrashing. But for Wilde, there was lots to talk about.
One of the key features of the CricViz database is the ability to look at how well batsmen play against different types of bowlers. This enables Wilde to say which player match-ups are likely to be particularly good or bad for each team. In this game, there was only one Sunrisers bowler, a spinner, Rashid Khan, who had a favourable record against the Royals’ two most destructive batsmen, Jos Buttler and Sanju Samson. Khan is usually most effective at bowling in the middle overs of an innings, but the Sunrisers captain bowled him early on to try and get Buttler and Samson out quickly. According to Wilde, “This was a huge strategic battle. The game hinged on Rashid against these two players”. But Buttler and Samson were wise to what was going on. They played Khan respectfully. The Royals scored 24 runs from Khan’s 24 balls and then went berserk, scoring 196 runs from the other 96. “These are the sorts of things that are shaping the match”, Wilde went on, “but they are only really apparent if you have done your research, or if you have numbers in front of you”.
In its early days, the IPL was such a success that every cricket nation wanted its own domestic Twenty20 tournament. Some became credible competitions, such as the Big Bash League (BBL) in Australia and the Pakistan Super League. Others folded amid commercial pressure and allegations of corruption. Alongside this proliferation of new leagues came demand from teams for CricViz’s expertise to build the best squads and develop more sophisticated match strategies. In response, Cooney and Oliver went on a recruitment drive of their own. Among the next round of hires was a young English graduate, Ben Jones, who had spent his boyhood trying to emulate Shane Warne by bowling hours of leg-spin in his garden.
Among Jones’ responsibilities is creating the match-packs that CricViz supplies to the teams it works with before their games. These are essentially scouting reports on the opposition. In the past, teams might have sent a coach to watch the opposition and make some notes. But in the Twenty20 era, CricViz’s efforts draw on the empirical findings of the company’s database, which contains information on every ball that each cricketer has ever played. What this does is hand “almost irrefutable” evidence to a captain or coach, according to Mike Atherton, to pursue their chosen strategy. Jones says he spends a day looking at the data on each opposition batsman, studying their recent form against every different sort of bowling at each different stage of the innings on pitches likely to be similar to the one used in the match. “I’ll do a grid for the captain”, he says, “with all of the batsmen and all of his bowlers in a traffic-light system to show him which ones are good match-ups. That’s a very visual way of condensing a lot of data”.
Part of the challenge for CricViz has been figuring out how to measure success in Twenty20. “All of our understanding, all of our language has been borrowed from one-day or Test cricket, which are so distinct from Twenty20 that they should really be regarded as different sports”, explains Wilde. In Test cricket, batsmen are judged by the number of runs they score in each innings. An average of 40 is considered excellent, 50 is world-class. But the brevity of Twenty20 means there is a much greater emphasis on how quickly the runs are scored. And even within Twenty20, the same innings - say 30 runs from 18 balls - can look more or less impressive, depending on the state of the match. CricViz has tried to provide some clarity on this by creating player impact ratings.
These take into account all aspects of a player’s performance: runs scored, strike rate, the quality of the bowling and the performance of the pitch and condense them into a single number. A team with a batsman with an impact rating of +6.5 runs would, therefore, be expected to score 6.5 runs more than if that player was replaced by an average batsman. Similarly, a bowler with a rating of +4 would be expected to reduce the opposition’s total by the same amount. Sam Billings, a member of England’s Twenty20 squad, is particularly enamoured with impact ratings. His role in the England team is to come in towards the end of an innings and push up the scoring rate. Quantifying this sort of contribution has been very difficult using traditional metrics. “CricViz are trying to bring in all the context to an innings, which is why it’s a really good concept”, he says.
For CricViz analysts, how the message is passed on is arguably as important as the recommendations themselves. “When Freddie and Ben deliver you a report they are actually telling you a story”, says Trent Woodhill, a former coach with the Melbourne Stars in the Big Bash League. “They are expressive with the data and that hooks you in”. For Jake Lush McCrum, the chief operating officer of the Rajasthan Royals, “The crucial thing when you've got these highly technical pieces of analysis is figuring out how to make the players understand them. What CricViz have done well is simplifying their presentation so that they encourage the players to go out and execute their plans”. Wilde credits his 140-character days on Twitter as a good grounding in how to deliver complex information succinctly.
Both Woodhill and McCrum are data evangelists. They were not tough nuts for CricViz to crack. Others have taken more work. Atherton, who Jones describes as “the schoolteacher that you really want to impress”, argues that data has a place in broadcasting, but “we have to be careful, because we're producing a television show, not a programme on astrophysics”. Jones also admits to deploying outright flattery: “I met Shane Warne, my childhood hero, in a commentary box. He was very sceptical about this skinny kid sat in the corner with his laptop”. (Like Wilde, Jones is in his mid-20s.) “I said to him, ‘You said this on commentary earlier. Here's a little card with some numbers on it that absolutely proves what you're saying’. He nodded sagely and came back to me a few overs later with another theory for me to test”.
In early 2020 Wilde and Jones came up against a new situation: they represented opposing teams. In the BBL both Melbourne clubs were CricViz clients, with Wilde advising the Renegades and Jones the Stars. “Going up against Freddie was a bit daunting”, Jones explains, “because he’s a genius. It was like playing 4D chess. Freddie knew the match-ups that I was going to be recommending. So then I considered pushing something else, like a double bluff”. The big talking point concerned the captain of the Renegades, Aaron Finch, who could score quickly, but had a clear weakness against googlies, a particular type of spinning delivery. According to Wilde: “There was one plan that I knew that Ben would enact against us. They had two spinners in their team – Sandeep Lamichhane and Adam Zampa – and it was absolutely guaranteed that as soon as Finch batted he was going to face the googlies. And sure enough, that exact thing happened”. Zampa bowled Finch with a googly in the first game and the Stars ended up winning both matches comfortably. “Bowling plans are just a starting point. In the end, the Stars just had much better cricketers,” says Jones, magnanimously.
BY PACKAGING ITS analysis in such a way that it is easy to digest for the casual fan and also rich and detailed for the connoisseur, CricViz has blown through the dusty corridors of cricket’s establishment like a fresh breeze. Confirmation of this came during a Twenty20 series between India and England earlier this year. Previously, Sky put up WinViz occasionally and used CricViz to provide “a sprinkling of numbers” on top of their coverage, according to Jones.
Then the pandemic struck. Suddenly it was impractical to fly to India to broadcast live from the grounds. “When you're not on site you can't rely on the little things that you pick up when you're a journalist on the ground. Atherton can't wander around and look at the pitch. You don’t hear the same whispers in the corridor. The broadcast becomes slightly more detached and thus necessarily analytical”, he continues.
Jones and Wilde were invited into a WhatsApp group with Sky’s commentators to decide what the coverage should discuss. Evidently, the presenters were impressed. “Atherton was literally using CricViz graphics from our blogs in the build-up to the game,” says Jones. “It was the most seriously covered and intensely discussed T20 series I've ever watched,” adds Wilde. “That level of coverage would have been unheard of five years ago”. Jones chimes in: “it's like playing Football Manager but for real people. It matters and people are watching.”
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This article was originally published by WIRED UK
