Cricket, data and Foxes

Cricket, data and Foxes

Rich Clarke
CricketPaper
Cricket data and foxes.png

Ever since Brad Pitt took the lead role in the movie Moneyball, sports data has been sexy.

If you remember, he played Billy Beane, GM of the Oakland As, whose innovative approach to “sabermetrics” saw them ‘bat well above their average’ in Major League Baseball during the first decade of the 21st century.

Football jumped on the trend relatively quickly and now most Premier League clubs have fully-stocked analytics departments reporting directly to the manager while lower-level teams will normally employ at least one data operative.

Such geekery has even extended into ownership with two of English football’s biggest overachievers, Brighton and Brentford, not only data-led but owned by former professional gamblers.

Dan Weston began a degree in finance and accountancy the year Beane took over at the As. But, on graduation, he used his numerical skills in a different way, playing poker, slot-machines and betting for a living. However, in the past few years, he has pivoted, being appointed Leicestershire’s player recruitment and strategy analyst in July 2020 while taking up a similar role at the Birmingham Phoenix franchise in The Hundred.

Dan Weston

Dan Weston

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“My job is to create recruitment content that feeds into the decision-makers at those clubs,” he told The Cricket Paper. “But I am part of the decision-making group too.

“Both teams want data to be part of their process but it is not the only part. There is due diligence after that - video analysis, feedback on personalities etc. It is a multi-pronged approach but data is the foundation for creating a list of players who fit with what we want to achieve.

“I look at long-term strategy too. It is no secret that, at Leicestershire, we are trying to build a young team who will grow together. We run the metrics on every single match and we are constantly in the top two youngest teams in the country. So, we hope they will eventually peak together at the same time.

“We are a team with a low budget. We must make every pound work better than our rivals. We have to outthink our opposition. So for us it is about having a long-term data approach where we are focused on the next four years not the next four days.”

Poker has long been considered the perfect Petri dish for rational thinking and game theory. Numerous academic studies were devoted to its strategy during its boom period a couple of decades ago when Beane was forging his reputation. It brings together data and psychology, two of the areas in which marginal gains may be found.

“There are many parallels between playing poker or being a professional gambler and running an analytics department for a sports team,” said Weston. “Poker is a long-term skill game but a short-term luck game. In US sport, it is reasonably commonplace to see these skillsets being employed these days.

“It is sometimes hard for supporters, commentators and the media to understand how a team can go through a game making generally good decisions and still lose. But, likewise, they can also make generally bad decisions and still win.

“For me, it is important to analyse the decision-making processes and your resources when you consider a team's success or failure. It’s about discipline, taking out the emotion and being rational.”

Pricking the balloon of wider perception is the price of this modern, data-driven approach. It is telling that Weston’s Twitter bio includes the phrase “the most dangerous phrase in the world is we've always done it this way”.

Football has been evolving quickly for a decade or so and we have become used to seeing specialist keepers brought on seconds before a penalty shoot-out or uninjured players omitted because their metrics say they are nearing a breakdown. England coach Gareth Southgate has taken this even further, deliberately listening to a wide and diverse group of specialists before moulding his team. It has brought reward but the knives would have been sharp had he failed.

Despite the England cricket team’s much-publicised use of data and a couple of interesting new books on the topic, Weston believes the sport is still lagging behind. He contacted numerous teams pitching his skills and blogged for years before Leicestershire took a chance.

Weston’s influence has been clear. The Foxes spent last winter recruiting talented players in their early 20s from other counties - Rishi Patel (Essex), Scott Steel (Durham) and Ed Barnes (Yorkshire). Meanwhile, they have pushed other young talents such as batsman Harry Swindells to the fore. It is unlikely to bring them progression to the business end of the County Championship or the Blast this season but they have been competitive throughout and, crucially, their young side has vast scope for improvement.

“It would have been really easy for Leicestershire to say they could not afford someone like me,” said Weston. “It was advanced thinking from [coach] Paul Nixon and Sean Jarvis, our CEO. There is a massive correlation between budget and finishing position in the Premier League and it is true in cricket too.

“But we might just finish above Surrey in our County Championship group and they have one of the biggest budgets in the game. For me, the fact that we are even close to them suggests we are on the right path.”

* This article first appeared in The Cricket Paper, get it every Sunday or subscribe here

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