Unlike the BBC, the ECB is under no pressure to reveal its salaries. The accounts show only that the highest-paid director received a little more than £600,000 in the last financial year. Were salaries revealed they would likely show that the head coach, Trevor Bayliss, is paid vastly more than the chairman of selectors, James Whitaker.
This reflects a myth that coaching is more important than selecting. Not so: once a player reaches international cricket, his technique is largely ingrained and there is little a coach can do. The coach is a babysitter of fragile egos, a creator of calm, and a lightning rod for criticism, little more. Given this limited influence, getting the right players on to the pitch in the first place is vital.
Selection has always struck me as a more interesting area of investigation. A limited hope for a coach at the highest level must be that he doesn’t make a player worse. (At a younger age, of course, a coach can have a significant impact either way.) But selection? It remains a fascinating art, full of debate and uncertainty, mixing science, data, instinct and intuition.
We all fancy ourselves as selectors don’t we? We argue our choices down the pub, pitching our XIs against those eventually chosen. And because our choices don’t matter, we can always have the last laugh over selectors who are accountable for their actions.
In a game based on luck, decision-making and character to a large degree, there will always be an element of uncertainty, mystery and error in selection, which is not to say that you can’t do everything possible to minimise that. For example, much has been made of Bayliss’s lack of knowledge of the county game and his inability because of the international schedule to watch county players, but the technology at his disposal now allows him to watch every ball of first-class and one-day cricket if he so wishes.
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The days of a selector travelling hundreds of miles only to find a hopeful getting bowled first ball are gone — every four, every dot ball, every wicket and catch is available at the push of a button. If Bayliss wanted to, he could, for example, watch England’s brightest young 15-year-old cricketers in action at the Bunbury Festival this week at Stowe School. Every ball is being filmed because it is at 15 that the England player pathway begins, and scouts and selectors start to get interested. These matches have already been downloaded on to the ECB’s database.
The most interesting research into talent development and identification is being conducted in the age gap between when players first get noticed and then selection for the Lions, which is one step away from full international honours. How to separate the wheat from the chaff, when both wheat and chaff might be scoring bundles of runs and taking bags of wickets and when careers and livelihoods depend on these decisions? Like most other sports, cricket’s battleground is between the old and the new.
There will always be room for old-fashioned intuition, and feel — a scouting network, in other words, of former first-class players with an eye for a player. “Multiple eyes, multiple times” is the mantra at the moment, as the ECB looks to make its talent-identification procedures more thorough. It is not enough for one scout to have seen a player put in one good performance, likely candidates must be watched by more than one pair of eyes, many times. This year the number of scouting reports on promising players has more than doubled. There are three formal selectors for the Young Lions (the under-19s) in Andy Hurry, John Abrahams, and David Graveney, but there are also a dozen others in scouting roles, many combining cricketing expertise with knowledge of adolescent development. To help with Lions selection, the ECB announced this week that Geoff Arnold, Jack Birkenshaw, Bob Cottam, John Emburey and Mike Hendrick, who have 5,591 first-class wickets between them, as well as 137 Test caps, will take on scouting roles throughout the pathway.
Hang on a minute, I hear you say. Aren’t they a bit long in the tooth? Cottam, for example, was coach of Young England when I was 18, three decades ago. To my mind, age is irrelevant provided that these scouts are open-minded, curious and close to the requirements of the modern game. An eye for a player does not diminish with age.
To go alongside this experience-based intuition, are hard data, science and analytics. This week, I chatted with Mo Bobat, the ECB’s player identification lead, who is keen to learn about talent identification from other sports. Football, he says, is more advanced than cricket but he has also been looking at the All Blacks, and American sporting franchises such as the Cleveland Browns, the American football team — anything to try and make the system “more consistent, evidence based and robust”.
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There is a PhD study being conducted at Loughborough on talent identification, using data generated from various England Under-19 groups from the past few years. This study has looked at certain indicators for potential, and is now breaking down and analysing statistics at a more detailed level so that it might set benchmarks for future stars.
The battleground between the old and the new, between intuition and analytics — the story of Moneyball, in other words — has been well ploughed. Interestingly, in America things have almost come full circle. When everyone is Moneyballing where does the edge in selection come from? From character, perhaps?
Theo Epstein, the Chicago Cubs’ president of baseball operations, is regarded as the foremost sporting manager in the world today. He told David Axelrod in The New Yorker: “I came into the game thinking that all the touchy-feely stuff about chemistry and connections was a manufactured narrative and that ultimately talent wins.” He does not believe that any more, and now his scouts spend as much time analysing the person as the player. Character matters.
All these imponderables such as character will be discussed alongside the hard numbers this week as the selectors sit down to pick the squad for the third Test. A personal view is that Test selection has been confused and lacking clarity over the past 12 months and mistakes made. Alongside that, it is worth remembering that, in the past, for every Michael Vaughan, plucked from nowhere on modest county statistics, there was a Gavin Hamilton.
It is worth remembering, too, that there will always be players who fail to make the grade at the highest level. That is how it is supposed to be. International cricket should be a notch up from domestic first-class cricket. In the darkness of that hard-to-bridge gap can be found the selectors, groping around and grappling as best they can with numbers and intuition, but always aware of their limitations in a game based in no small part on luck, character and decision-making. Selection is vital, but it is an inexact science.