Dumping data will subtract further from England’s ambitions

In this tournament, however, England have actually scaled right back their use of data-driven analysis. Under the Andocracy of Flower and Strauss, such analysis was one component of their success (and always used more in Tests than one-day internationals, in any case), as they were believers both in its value and confident that a strong and experienced group of players could cope with what might be termed information overload. Even then, there were always players, such as Graeme Swann and Kevin Pietersen, who were sceptics and charted their own course.

But in this World Cup, the management, at the insistence of Morgan, the new captain, felt that a younger, less experienced group of players would benefit from keeping things simple and reducing the clutter and information. So although every player is given an iPad with statistics and videos of opposition players, it is left entirely to them as to how much they access this information, if at all. It is not forced down their throats and statistics are rarely discussed at team meetings to the extent that they were in the past.

For accuracy, it is worth charting the path of England’s use of statistical analysis. Nathan Leamon, a Cambridge mathematician and former teacher at Tonbridge and Eton, was asked by Flower to join an analytics department in 2009. Using many tools that are now commonplace, such as HawkEye, and some that are not, such as Monte Carlo simulations, Leamon became an integral part of the England management team, challenging some preconceptions and misconceptions about the game. Over time, Leamon’s department has become better resourced and there are now five full-time analysts working across all England cricket teams.

Flower and Strauss were converts. Leamon has never made outsized claims for his role, and would say that the best analogy is that his data acts as a video camera on the cricketing world, showing players and coaches the game as it really is rather than how they may sometimes imagine it in their minds.

His work often starts with a hunch, driven by a cricketer or a coach, then he mines the data to try to prove or disprove that hunch. It is simply one tool among many for a coach to use and no one, least of all Leamon, would lay claim to the notion that somehow a mathematical formula can crack the mysterious code of cricket.

Because of the greater number of variables in one-day cricket, the three batting stages of the game, for example, and the changing regulations, the analysis department’s role was not so significant. But in early 2012, frustrated by England’s relative underperformance in one-day internationals, Flower asked Leamon to try to model an approach to the one-day game. This coincided with a strong debate within the team (highlighted during a particularly tempestuous team meeting in Dubai), the lightning rod for which was Jonathan Trott’s role at No 3, and how aggressive the batsmen should be at the top of the order more generally.

Leamon’s input — determining that Trott’s role was statistically significant in setting a platform for the charge at the end of an innings and in helping to win games — helped to clarify England’s approach thereafter. It suited the type of players that England had at that point, and that the next global event, the Champions Trophy, was to be played in England, where the new ball would likely challenge the top order, so making that kind of template even more sensible and productive.

England’s fortunes in one-day internationals took an upturn about this time. They won ten consecutive one-day games against Pakistan, West Indies and Australia and became the No 1-ranked one-day team in August 2012. How far the analytics helped is open to interpretation, as it always is, and England had a strong, experienced and successful group of players at this point.

Leamon’s input provided clarity. The players were now sure in their minds about how they were to approach each game, a clarity reinforced again by the upswing in results. Ashley Giles, appointed one-day coach in November 2012, watered down Flower’s enthusiasm for numbers, and reviews of matches were no longer so statistically driven, but the team played to the same template in the Champions Trophy, in which they were runners-up to India. In a tournament of only two scores more than 300, it was an approach that clearly worked.

A combination of internal and external chafing about the value of data, a change of management, the disintegration after the Ashes whitewash and, crucially, the change in regulations that accelerated scores outside of English conditions especially, meant that England gradually moved away from that formula.

Before the tri-series and the World Cup, Morgan was insistent that a fresh and young group of players should be given the freedom to play naturally and instinctively and be allowed to discover their own style without being bogged down by numbers and statistics.

Keeping things simple has been the mantra throughout this campaign. Moores, very aware of the need to step back from the hectoring way in which he had coached England the first time around, was happy to fall in with this approach. Leamon’s role has been more one-on-one, available to help as and when called upon, and there has been less statistical input into team meetings than in the past.

Just in case you think you need a PhD in applied mathematics to play cricket for England these days, I asked Leamon to see the kind of information with which England’s players are routinely provided. The timing, on the morning of the Bangladesh game, was prescient given the howls of derision that followed Moores’s after-match assertion that he’d need to “look at the data” to find out where England were going wrong.

It was a terrible choice of words at a terrible time (it was hard to recall a coach/captain combination looking as shellshocked as Moores and Morgan did after that match), but it highlighted a different problem, which is the infiltration of business speak, management waffle and gobbledegook into sport. Moores is a purveyor of that nonsense, although he is not the only one.

Back to specifics: let us say England are playing New Zealand. If he so wished, a player could open the specific app for that match that would provide Hawk-Eye analysis and video of the opposition players. If he wanted to know all the slower-ball variations Tim Southee has up his sleeve, a video package is ready and waiting. If he wanted to know where Brendon McCullum scores his boundaries in the first five overs, say, that information is to hand, too.

Ground dimensions for batsmen and bowlers wishing to reconnoitre the ground before the game are there, as are recent statistics for matches played at that ground. All the information is there if a player wants to access it. There is no obligation to do so and it is certainly not rocket science. It is full of the kind of analysis that, were I playing, I would find extremely valuable.

Another misconception is that England use numbers and data far more than other teams. Naturally, opposition teams are unwilling to share best practice for fear of releasing secrets or any advantage, so it is difficult to compare. But recently, Paul Farbrace moved from the Sri Lanka to the England dressing room and provides a noteworthy comparison.

During their victorious World Twenty20 campaign last spring, Sri Lanka outsourced their data requirements to an Indian outfit, who had 20 operatives working on it before Sri Lanka’s final against India.

Sri Lanka’s players, thought of as instinctive and natural and as full of uninhibited flair as any, devoured the information they were given and it is credited with playing an important role in shutting down India’s batsmen during the final. Anybody who has spoken to Kumar Sangakkara about batting would know that he approaches each innings with surgical precision, having virtually played out the performance in his mind beforehand.

New Zealand were using Moneyball-style number-crunching as long ago as the 2007 World Cup. And when Mike Hesson, their coach, referred, during the early stages of this competition, to the minutiae of having not just Plan A for every batsman in the opposition, but Plans B and C as well, no one complained that New Zealand were being too robotic. Everyone is using data to a greater or lesser extent. England are the not the originators of some weird statistical cult. As ever, wins and losses drive the narrative.

England have been awful at this tournament and there are many reasons why, but that they have been bogged down by statistics is a false trail. It could be a damaging one, too. If the notion that the use of data becomes “toxic” there is every chance that whoever takes charge next will retreat, in the interests of PR, from it completely, meaning that England will fall even farther behind the rest of the world. They are far enough behind as it is.