COACHING : Is Laptop Coaching Taking the Drama Out of Cricket?

A new phrase is creeping in to cricket: Laptop coaching. And it’s not seen as a good thing.

It’s all pervasive in professional cricket: Analysts record every ball of matches and coaches pour over the stats looking for trends. Innings and bowling spells are recorded and catalogued for later analysis. Critics say the approach is responsible for creating robotic cricketers with no life skills beyond the ability to ‘hit the right areas’.

It’s all stats and spreadsheets.

 

Where’s the flair gone? The magic? The drama?

In fact, laptop coaching helps create drama.

To find out why we have to go to Oakland in California and find out about a man called Billy Beane. Bean was the general manager of the Oakland Athletics baseball side in the early 2000’s. On the back of his success with limited resources, his coaching style became the subject of the book ‘Moneyball’. The book outlined the idea that traditional common knowledge about what makes a good player is flawed. Beane looked beyond traditional statistics to learn which skills were more important to what was really happening. He then bought these hidden stars at a low price because all the other sides were still looking at the traditional methods.

Then in 2008 in the IPL, Rajasthan Royals did exactly the same thing using similar principles. All thanks to analysis that a laptop helped provide. Despite spending far less than most teams in the player auction, they won the competition. They knew the bargains and they made them into a team.

For example, the good old-fashioned dot ball. Traditionally the closest thing we had to analysing dots was the batsman’s strike rate (runs per 100 balls). Now coaches can know much more. A dot might be a play and miss, a thick edge just short of a fielder or a cover drive out of the middle brilliantly fielded. Knowing this tells you a lot more than the dot used to. It’s analysis like this that improves standards and gives players to confidence to play with a bit more flair because they know their actions are based in facts rather than the wisdom of shaky oracle-like former players.

The ECB picked up on the trend for the objective, creating a way of measuring fielding ability and analysing performance of England players in international matches. Based on the data, England’s coaches could rank fielders in every discipline to a geeky granular level. They could then design drills and give out work to players in a specific way.

And it seems to be working with England a very highly skilled fielding unit. No one can complain about the lack of drama in a brilliant bit of work in the field.

Away from team stats, confidence can also be shaped at an individual level with the laptop.

Take good old fashioned bowling practice. Still in use today at every level the idea is simple; put down a target and bowl at it over and over again. The more you hit it the better you are. Technology is allowing coaches and players to track this. Perhaps in the past a player would practice and hope things were getting better, just ‘feeling’ that the target was getting hit more often than not.

With an impact sensor like PitchVision hooked up to a laptop, every ball is recorded: Line, length and pace. At the simplest level it’s now possible for coaches to track player’s improvements over time. Last month accuracy was 78%, this month let’s aim for 80%.

If you want to delve deeper into the stats you can find out much more detailed information: how pace relates to accuracy for example. Players who know this information and can literally see improvements. They  gain confidence, play better and are able to provide excitement and drama they want.

And that is just as true at club and school level as it is in the international game.

So the real secret is that a laptop is neither a cause nor a preventer to better cricket.

Good play and exciting play comes from hard work and effective coaching. The stats can help a coach make the hard work pay off more quickly, but without the work itself technology is useless.

Let’s not berate laptop coaching and stick to berating bad coaching instead. Laptops are a tool. Bad workmen blame tools.