How Do We Make Great Players Even Better? - Analytics And Player Development

Jack Hope writes about play development and the future of cricket analytics

Something we don’t talk about enough, when we talk about data and analysis in cricket, is player development. Often when someone talks about stats in a cricketing context it comes packaged as part of an inflexible statement “this player is better than that player because of these metrics”. 

After 25 matches of this year’s IPL it might be time to re-evaluate that approach, and look at where we might go next with analytics in cricket. 

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The state of the game

A VERY simplistic example of where we stand with cricket analytics can be illustrated with a rudimentary search for explosive batters. We know in T20 cricket having a high strike rate is valuable, as players that possess this attribute will help your team use their limited resources to score more runs. 

If you were put in charge of recruiting batters who fit that bill, for a fictional franchise, with publicly available tools you could do a lot worse than pulling up Cricmetric, and taking a look at all players to have faced 500 balls in T20 cricket since the start of 2021.

Wait approximately 30 seconds for the search to pull through, and you end up with a list of 151 players, which you could rank in order of strike rate to give you some targets. Obviously a real analyst will conduct far more due diligence than this, looking into seam/spin splits, handedness, quality of opposition, conditions, shot control, and likely using their own database. But, ultimately the method is the same, we are looking at what has come before, and we are using that information to make predictions about what will happen in the future. 

Taking our example above a bit further, in a world with no overseas restrictions, if you just picked players near the top of the list, you’d probably end up with quite a good batting card. In addition to this, based on the valuation of these players in leagues across the world, you’d probably also find that you could get yourself a few bargains. 

Right now it is probably a fair statement to say that: the biggest advantage you can gain through analytics in T20 franchise leagues is via recruitment. 

To really drive that home, we live in a world where the franchise which won last season’s IPL ignored the first 150 names on the list, to select the guy who is dead last (Kane Williamson striking at 108) and paid 2 crore for the privilege. 

However, this is changing and will continue to change. Teams are getting smarter, and in the near future maximising player potential will be a more reliable route to victory, than trying to find an overlooked full formed diamond. 

We are moving towards a world where everybody can make competent predictions about a player’s expected output. The best teams are going to be the ones who work with their players to exceed those predictions. 

Player development is the future. 

What is development?

If you spend enough time immersing yourself in the world of T20 cricket Julian Wood is a name you will run into. Wood is an ex-player and one of the most innovative coaches, specialising in power hitting. 

More than a decade ago Wood realised which way the short form game was going. Armed with this prescience, and applying principles from hitting in baseball, he set about building a coaching programme which he could apply to cricket, oriented around hitting 6s. 

Note: There are a few reasons we want to prioritise 6s. Most obviously because 6 is more than 1, 2, 3, and even 4! But also because 6s offer a more sustainable way to maintain a high strike rate outside of the powerplay, when fielders are pushed back to the boundary. And because if you hit the ball over the rope, no amount of good fielding can prevent that, which is a genuine issue if you mainly deal in 4s.  

And this is what is really interesting about Wood. Rather than accept a fixed notion that some players can hit for power and some cannot, he treats power as a teachable skill. 

You can get a flavour of Wood's programme by searching YouTube. Here he is in a coaching session with Benny Howell, explaining the exact speed you need to be hitting the ball to clear the longest boundaries, and running a set of drills with him. 

Benny Howell, also one of cricket’s great innovators (you can hear him talking about his process with us on the podcast here), provides a great story about how effective development can be. 

Prior to the end of 2017 Benny Howell averaged 22.9, and struck at 120. In the years since his average has remained more or less static, but his strike rate has improved to 149. His 6% rate has doubled from 3.5% to 7%. He is absolutely mashing the ball and is one of the 19 players striking at over 150 since 2021.

It really is a textbook example of development. Taking us from point A, a player who from an analytical perspective had flaws to their batting, through point B, where he addressed those flaws by developing skills, to point C a player who now has serious power. 

On the off chance that anybody who actually plays the game reads this the message is pretty simple. Hit the ball hard and hit the ball up. Your strike rate is in the air.   

What is happening in the IPL?

This brings us to the IPL, where change has happened fast. The league wide 6% rate has increased. Last season somebody cleared the ropes every 16.2 balls (a 6.1% rate), this season it has fallen to 14.5 (a 6.8% rate). There is reason to believe that this shift is happening because of player development. 

Here are the increases in 6% rate between 2022 and 2023 for the batters we have any kind of a sample size for (a minimum of 100 balls in 2022 and 2023 - expanded list here). 

What is striking here, is that the list isn’t really dominated by players who are young, or who have recently joined the league after proving their mettle in other leagues, or who are surfing the age curve. There are actually a fair few players who would have been projected to decline. 

If you want more detail, sort this data by 6s hit, this upsurge in league wide power is being helped along by a group of retooled and improved IPL veterans. Older players like Faf du Plessis, Kohli, Rohit and Rahane, are clearly doing something differently.  

These are guys who hit a below average number of 6s in 2022. They are also guys who, despite having extremely prolific seasons in the past, in terms of runs, have never been explosive 6 hitters. Three of the four never having hit more than 6% of their deliveries faced for 6 over an IPL season.

Note: we should take into account that there is probably a little bit of a Chinnaswamy effect at play, and the sample size isn’t huge. But in the defence of someone like Faf du Plessis, he has produced in other tournaments very recently, carrying a year to date T20 strike rate of 155. He’s also the leading run scorer in the tournament with a strike rate of 172, that’s frickin’ good!

We should also pay attention to guys like Gaikwad, who have broken out. He is younger, and it is reasonable to have expected him to be good. The manner of how he has been good is demonstrably different to the past. He was a player who had a strong bias towards hitting fours, a prototypical anchor batter. 

This season, despite only hitting 2% more of the deliveries he faces for a boundary, he has changed his game to hit more shots in the air. In fact he is actually hitting fewer fours this year than in the past, but because his pull shot now lands 10 rows back, instead of skimming into the advertising hoarding on the bounce, his strike rate has increased by 24 points. 

Whether Gaikwad has driven that change himself, or whether it is CSK’s coaches, or somebody else entirely, we have to commend that improvement. Assuming here, of course, that this isn’t just statistical noise, and that the changes he appears to have made stick around. 

We now need to ask questions about how they are doing this? What change did Faf du Plessis make to increase the number of balls he hit for 6 by more than 2% after 2021, at an age when most cricketers have hung up the spikes? 

Where analysts come in…

You can conceptualise a player’s potential using a simple fan chart. I have been really lazy here, and instead of using one about cricket I have ripped a generic image from Google, but the concept remains the same.

Based on previous performance we can predict a player’s most likely output, and display this in the dark green area below. Based on the wider player pool’s historic performance, age, and other factors we can also predict a likely ceiling and a floor for their performance. On the chart this is shown in the lighter shaded areas above and below the dark green. 

What we are seeing from Faf, Kohli, Gaikwad, Rahane and others is performance above expectations. They are performing in the lighter green areas above the darker green most likely expectation. In other words, they are getting closer to their ceiling. 

Typically analysis in cricket has focussed on the dark green portion of the fan chart, helping teams project players’ likely production. This means teams make smarter selection and recruitment choices.

In the future we are likely to see this role expand, with analysts taking a more development oriented approach. Helping to project a player’s potential ceiling, and through the use newer tools, such as biometric tracking, setting out a roadmap for players to reach that potential.

To round this point off with a tangible example (which probably has already happened in some cases), imagine that we knew Player X was hitting the ball hard enough to clear the ropes, but had a tendency towards hitting his shots on the ground. Armed with this information a good analyst could project that the player had the potential to be a good six hitter and highlight this to the player and their coach. Then, with adequate coaching, and buy in from the player, there’s the potential that they could unlock a quality hitting option.

That is analysis led player development in a nutshell. 

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