Expert Blog

Tuesday, August 24, 2010

About bugs and worms

Recent ODI performances have left spectators with no joy and the Sri Lanka-India-New Zealand tri-series is proof of tedious one-sided affairs.

The national outrage about the ‘New Delhi’ bug (actually, New Delhi Metallo-beta-lactamase-1 or NDM-1) was puzzling. The big story there was that too many patients are being administered antibiotics, and this is likely to make antibiotics much less effective in the future.

Surely the correct response would have been to recognize the problem and take steps to ameliorate the situation. Instead we chose to get angry and indignant; not just because national pride was hurt, but more because a lucrative market for medical tourism was being threatened.

There’s another evil bug too doing the rounds: the bug surrounding one-day international (ODI) cricket. Like antibiotics, we are administering far too much of ODI, and the results are beginning to show.

During the last tri-series in Sri Lanka (was it last month? Can’t remember names, dates and results any more), it was a shock to find a practically empty stadium even for an India-Sri Lanka league game. The spectators were sending out a strong signal: we’re having too much of this ODI nonsense, and, sorry, we aren’t interested any more. TV viewers too have become selective: they switch on only if Sehwag is batting, or Sachin is approaching another century, or during the last five overs of a match inching towards an Indian victory.

What about the players themselves? The smart ones like Sachin Tendulkar have already worked out their stopping rule and would rather not play at all, instead of turning up to play with sharply reduced intensity and fervour. Only the Ravindra Jadejas want to show up because their time is running out and it might be their last opportunity to show off their new dark (or blue or green) eye glasses or equally colourful stubbles.

Little wonder, then, that so many ODI matches are becoming so one-sided these days. The players are simply going through the motions; and if a match looks like a lost cause, they don’t even try to put up a fight. This, for example, is the big story of the ongoing Sri Lanka-India-New Zealand tri-series. Every match in the series has been one-sided!

How could one spot one-sided matches? Simple! Just look at the margin of defeat.

How could one compare two or more one-sided matches? In effect, how could one answer the question: “Which one-sided match was more one-sided?”

There’s an interesting way to answer that question: use the Castrol worm! Arvind Iyengar explains (see http://bit.ly/bHNd1V) how the Castrol worm indicates which team is winning.

The Castrol worm is essentially a plot of every team’s Castrol Index on a ball-by-ball basis. If, at over 30 of the 100-over match, the red Australian Castrol worm is above the green West Indian Castrol worm, it means that Australia is winning at that point.

If the reader can find the time to scroll horizontally on the cricket calendar on www.castrolcricket.com he will be able to see the Castrol worms for all matches in the current SL-India-NZ tri-series.

In the August 16 match that India won easily (the ‘Randiv vs Sehwag match’ as it will now be called), the Sri Lankan worm could not breach the Indian worm even once. It was just the opposite in the Aug 22 match when the Indian worm almost always stayed well below the Sri Lankan worm.

If one worm stays uniformly above the other, with no intersection, it clearly means that it was a one-sided match.

It is now easy to measure the ‘one-sidedness’ of every match. We simply calculate the difference in the Castrol Index of the two teams after every ball, and then sum this difference over all the 600 (or less) balls played in the match (of course taking the sign into account). The greater this sum, the more one-sided was the match.

http://www.castrolcricket.com/ee/index.php/castrol_weblog/comments/about_bugs_and_worms/

Tuesday, August 10, 2010

Cricket scorecards: Yesterday, today and tomorrow

Our expert reminisces over a cherished childhood memory and makes interesting observations on what the future of cricket scorecards should be.

I have no clue how cricket match scoring is done these days. There must be some software doing the job. The software probably requires the scorer to select the name of the bowler bowling and the batsman facing … with little boxes to key in the outcome after every ball. If it is a wicket-taking ball, a new window probably pops up seeking information about the nature of the dismissal.

All this data must be going into a database. Computer programs then generate the ‘batting scorecard’, ‘fall of wickets’, ‘bowling analysis’ etc., and graphical displays showing the bowler’s pitch map, the batsman’s wagon wheel, images of the ‘Manhattan’, the ‘worm’ and what have you.

You don’t have to go very far to see such graphical displays: simply check out the stylish displays on http://www.castrolcricket.com itself!

Is today’s scorecard good enough? At first sight, it would seem so. Scorecards have come a long way from the time I used to be a schoolboy scorer at the Osmania University cricket ground in Hyderabad some 40 years ago! (see image below)

If you look at this scorecard it is clear that it was essentially designed to report cricket match scores as they appeared in the appendix pages of a Neville Cardus classic, or in the mellifluous voice of a commentator like Brian Johnston or our own P Ananda Rau; specifically, it recorded every batsman’s score (with mode of dismissal), extras (or sundries if you were Australian), the bowler’s bowling analysis and the fall of wickets.

There were two flaws in this scorecard, one serious and the other fatal. The serious flaw was that it gathered very little time data (often just ‘game start time’ and ‘game finish time’). The fatal flaw was that it practically never linked the batsman and the bowler! The scorecard would say that M L Jaisimha hit a four, that Abid Ali was hit for a four … but couldn’t say that Jaisimha hit Abid Ali for a four! The only time this link was recorded was when batsman Jaisimha was dismissed by bowler Abid Ali.

Today we can recognize that this happened because we didn’t have the database concept those days, at least not in cricket.

How would I like tomorrow’s scorecard to look like? Ideally, it should record the complete chain of events from the time the bowler runs it to bowl … till the time the ball is deemed to be ‘dead’.

Yesterday’s ‘recording’ required the use of a pencil and the entry of minimal data. Today’s recording requires the use of a mouse click and the creation of number-rich database entries. Tomorrow’s recording must go much, much farther: it should involve the creation of a multimedia database file that features time-stamped text, audio, video and animation content on a ball-by-ball basis.

To be sure, something like this is already going on. We have commentators speaking intelligently, we have photographers shooting still and video pictures and we have animators doing their Hawkeye or hot spot or similar stuff … but we are still not labeling and synchronizing this content on a database using a rigid timeline.

To understand what we mean, suppose Ricky Ponting wants to figure out what he’s doing wrong when he faces Ishant Sharma. About the best he can do today is to call for the tapes and go through the painful process of rewinding and reviewing.

In tomorrow’s data-rich process, with data querying capability, Ponting could be much more specific and, for example, ask: “only show me the frames and footage when my score was less than 10, when Ishant was bowling at a speed greater than 140 km/h, on middle or off stump, and only at the point when I nicked the ball or the ball crashed into my pads” … and such footage would be retrieved in a split second!

Like cricket itself, cricket scorecards too are changing … and will continue to change. While we must applaud the leap in technology, there is also wistful longing for cricket’s charm of yore, exemplified by a gorgeous straight drive by M L Jaisimha. My own cherished cricket scorecard moment also features Jaisimha. I was barely 12 when Jaisimha looked over my shoulder while I was scoring in a Hyderabad league match and congratulated me on my meticulous work. Like that straight drive, this memory too will stay with me forever.

http://www.castrolcricket.com/ee/index.php/castrol_weblog/comments/cricket_scorecards_yesterday_today_and_tomorrow/