good length”. Kane Williamson: “fourth stump, good length”. Grant Elliot: “fourth stump, good length”.
For the maverick Colin Munro, the plan was “fourth stump, back of length”.
A cushy existence, this team analysis lark: telling the best fast bowler in the world to bowl pretty much
where he usually bowls anyway.
The point to all this is that in this data-rich age of international cricket, where all the numbers and all the
video can be accessed at a moment’s notice, it’s very often not entirely clear where the sophistry ends and
the common sense begins.
That’s not a slight on the dozens of analysts all over the world doing genuinely interesting work, often in
the Twenty20 leagues that have proven a fertile breeding ground for fresh tactics. But occasionally, it’s
possible to take a certain dangerous comfort in the thoroughness of your preparation, and day three of this
absorbing Ashes Test was a case in point.
One of the reasons analysis has taken off in Twenty20 in such a big way is that a shorter game sharpens the
need to find a decisive edge. But its influence is increasingly being felt in the longer format too, in culture as
much as in practice. What these three days have confirmed for us is what we basically already knew: that
England and Australia are extremely evenly matched, flawed in their own ways but of roughly similar
strength. And so the idea of first-mover advantage, of finding the one-percenter that will make the
difference in a close contest, has assumed an added urgency.
Within the England dressing room, nobody takes his data as seriously as Stuart Broad. It’s amusing to
remember now the way he was characterised, at the start of his career, as a sort of pouting, soft-focus
celebrity cricketer. As we would discover over the years, there’s no bigger geek in the England team, and
after Thursday’s play he offered up another of those answers that manages to be both extremely interesting
and extremely uninteresting at the same time.
Apparently, a few weeks ago Broad was talking to his coach Peter Moores and analyst Kunal Manek at
Nottinghamshire about something called his ‘leave percentage’. “They told me it was a bit higher than the
norm,” he revealed. “And today, my leave percentage was under 15 per cent. Which is really low, as my
average can be between 25-26 per cent. It’s a little thing, but it’s brilliant coaching and analyst work.”
A question: what did you feel, as you read those words? Intrigued? Bored? Did you feel a little tingle in your
nerdy nether regions? Or did your eyes begin to drift towards the related content and Outbrain adverts at
the edge of the page? There’s no right answer to this question, but to me the really interesting part is that it
took three of the sharpest brains in English cricket to work out what any semi-regular follower of the team
could have told him in a twinkling: pitch the bloody thing up, Broad.
Steve Smith helped Australia secure a lead on
day three (AFP/Getty)