Nathan Leamon laughs as he remembers the time he once got Andrew Strauss out in an Ashes Test. It was the Adelaide Test of 2010-11, and ahead of the game the Australians had recalled the left-armer Doug Bollinger to their attack. Not having faced Bollinger in a while, Strauss asked Leamon – still relatively new in his job as the team’s analyst – to put together some clips.
“But the last time Bollinger had played was actually at Headingley against Pakistan,” Leamon recalls. “So Straussy watches 20 balls of Bollinger hooping the ball away from the bat, and walks out. First ball went absolutely gun-barrel straight. He left it. And it took his off-bail. He walked back in, took his pads off, sat down next to me. Eventually I worked up the nerve to say: ‘Sorry, think I might have got you out there, skip’. He said: ‘I wouldn’t disagree.’”
He can laugh about it now for two reasons. Firstly, because more than a decade has passed, and of course England ended up winning both that Test and the series. And secondly, as a statistician Leamon knows that a single data point tells you very little on its own. As humans we are inescapably drawn to the outlier, the exception, the anecdote. Leamon has always tried to express the very opposite: that to draw any kind of reliable conclusions from data, it helps to look at as much of it as possible.
This and many other lessons are set out in his new book Hitting Against The Spin, which seeks to explain some of the game’s hidden patterns and overlooked trends. Why India produces relatively few left-handed batsmen (largely because spin is a bigger threat in the early overs). Why Nasser Hussain was (statistically) right to bowl first at Brisbane in 2002. And why the frequent incantations for fast bowlers to “just pitch it up” often do more harm than good.
“Analysis is about making the invisible visible,” Leamon explains. “The analogy I always use is cameras. Being able to slow things down and freeze frames enables a coach to make better decisions, but it doesn’t do the coaching for him.”
These days, virtually every major team will employ some form of advanced statistical analysis to help scout oppositions, mould tactics, identify signings. Leamon now combines his work for England’s white-ball team with Multan Sultans and Kolkata Knight Riders. But when Andy Flower first hired Leamon in 2009, analytics was still largely in its infancy. The vast, rich cache of searchable ball-by-ball data upon which is based pretty much the entire industry only really existed once Leamon built it, over thousands of painstaking hours. “That’s what long tours of Bangladesh are for,” he says with a smile.
And it really has been some journey: one taking in Ashes wins and defeats, World Cup humiliation and World Cup triumph. Captains and coaches have come and gone, but Leamon has remained: the living embodiment of a culture shift that has essentially changed the way we see the game. Naturally, pockets of traditionalist resistance remain. But what is perhaps surprising is how little Leamon encountered in English cricket, which largely bought into his ideas from the start. “I was lucky that the senior figures, people like Strauss and Paul Collingwood, were very open and enthusiastic about using data,” he remembers. “There were people who weren’t as convinced. But I was always amazed at how little pushback there was.”
One of the main criticisms of data is that it can often increase the scrutiny on a player’s weaknesses. So let’s say you’re a young opener who has a potential weakness against left-arm swing. Is it even healthy to know that? How much is too much knowledge? “That’s a very individual thing,” Leamon responds. “For the right player, it’s useful. Some players don’t want to know and aren’t interested. It’s not something you would push. I certainly wouldn’t be talking any specifics to a player on debut, or when they’re quite new.”
Indeed, for the modern analyst knowing what not to reveal is often just as important. Leamon recalls another episode from early 2010 when he shows Strauss a simulation projecting that England have an 8% chance of winning that winter’s Ashes series. Leamon recalls Strauss telling him quietly: ‘You might not want to leave that on your screen around the dressing room’.
What’s the next leap in cricket analysis? “The big one is fielding,” Leamon says. “We still don’t know where they’re stood. We don’t have ball speed off the bat. That will give us the scope to evaluate each fielding position. A lot of it we’ll already be getting right.” But – and here he speaks with the assurance of someone who knows from hard-won experience – “there’ll be things we’re getting systematically wrong.”