UP490 Inside Edge - Freddie Wilde on Cricket's Analytics Arms Race

0:00Hello, Richard Gillis. Welcome to Unofficial Partner and this is Inside Edge, our series on the business of cricket with my co-host Mike Jakeman. Our guest today is Freddie Wilde, who is one of the new generation of cricket analytics professionals who've transformed the game. Historically, RCB have been a team who have become renowned for investing heavily in one or two players, quite often star-studded batters at the top of the order and neglecting other areas of the team. And to be fair, they were a hell of an entertaining side for a team who lost a lot. That was part of the allure of them as a franchise was, you know, they were very watchable, but maddeningly frustrating in that they couldn't sort of get across the line.

0:40Freddie Wilde is one of the most sought after of a new generation of cricket analytics professionals who've transformed the game over the last 15 to 20 years. He was a journalist when I first know him. He wrote a very good book along with Tim Wigmore called Cricket 2.0 Inside the T20 Revolution, which was Wisdom's Book of the Year in 2020. And he was Head of Performance Analysis at CrickViz for seven years. He's now the lead analyst for the Oval Invincibles, team analyst for the IPL-winning Royal Challengers Bangalore. So he's just back from that event. And he's just finished a stint as England's white ball analyst alongside Nathan Lehman, who we referenced in the podcast.

1:23We also reference another podcast with Mo Bobat, which I'll put in the show notes, which is, again, quite a nice accompaniment to this. And it also turns out that Mo is Freddie's boss at the Royal Challengers Bangalore. Anyway, loads in there. And it's not just about cricket, I assure you. It's really fascinating insight from someone who's right at the sharp end of one of the most interesting areas of the sports business. This episode of Unofficial Partner is brought to you by Sid Lee Sport. Sidley Sport is a new breed of agency that combines world-class creativity with deep sponsorship expertise, flawless operational delivery and a culture of marketing effectiveness.

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2:42What did you think of my Claude does Freddie Wilde? I thought it was quite an interesting experiment. I've started to do that with podcast guests and it's a sort of very much a hit and miss affair. I was pretty impressed because it was pretty thorough. I didn't feel like I was befitting of such a long explanation as to what I'd done or who I was. So when I flicked through that, I thought, God, that's a very long explanation for what I didn't seem to think necessarily warranted that. But the detail in there was pretty good. I mean, as we said, we chatted a bit on WhatsApp about it. there's a couple of things that it maybe hadn't quite picked up, but like I'm increasingly using things like that, mainly chat GPT, but like to just do, you know, research tasks or, you know, sometimes rewrite an email or whatever it might be.

3:32It is very efficient and a lot easier than doing it yourself. A lot of the time. Mike, are you into this? Are you going to hang back in a very sort of professorial way? You're not going to, you know, dirty your hands with large language models. It's really tricky because it's, balancing potential efficiency gains, here I am being the economist, versus risking making myself obsolete. There are contracts that I've signed as a freelance writer in which I say I won't use them. But increasingly, I see it popping up in different places. And it does make me a bit nervous, just in terms of how easily some of what I do could be replaced.

4:15On the other hand, And what I've not seen from it yet is the creative stuff. So it can create what's already been done by us in perpetuity and do infinite variations on it. But I haven't seen it create the big ideas that are where I suppose I try and bring like the most value adds to the people I work for. I think I did a sort of experiment, run a few things with it. I'm slightly obsessed with it. And like you, I wouldn't ever publish anything or put anything out under my own name. you know using it it's a research tool at the moment but i can sort of see what i did was i ran through like a i gave it a load of information from my substat newsletter sort of archive and i ran through it and asked it to look for patterns around finance and various things and come back and sort of present it in a mckinsey-esque type way you know in terms of like that that very dry format and it was quite interesting because it did it and you initially you think oh wow this is this is incredible you know and actually then when you went down a layer you thought actually no they've there's there's a whole load of really bad mistakes that it's made as you go through really fundamental things that and then has taken that mistake and you could because i've written it all i'm the only person that would know what the mistakes are and it sort of took so it took something that there was an example where it called the whole thing the money doesn't care okay which was a line that i i'd written some at some point on the substat and it sort of took that and then ran with that as an idea and then built around that and then added a load of things but because they got that quote out of context everything else was wrong and it was quite interesting because actually if you read it at first glance and i put both versions out because I sort of said, right, okay, here's what it did initially.

6:11And then I got it to critique itself. And it absolutely hammers itself, you know, in terms of like, this is a load of old shit. But it sort of got fundamental things wrong and then extrapolated on those. And you sort of think, wow, because that is really going to be difficult to unpick because I read through it and it took me a while, but I'd written it and it was quite, you know, so I can see, you can sort of see the pull of it. And particularly I'm not in the game of, you know, daily churn and wanting to sort of just keep on producing. And you can see across LinkedIn, people are just bunging stuff up and it's a C, but it's really quite an interesting problem because better than you think and much, much worse than you think as well at the same time.

7:05but we should jump on to freddy we should talk about freddy this is a very long way in so what claude said about freddy was he's 28 i'm actually 30 31 very recently this is brilliant son of veteran sunday times correspondent simon wilde which i think is true uh educate background in journalism and analytics current role in the men's white ball cricket analyst which is not true either so of the first four things it gave us two were absolutely fundamentally wrong and we'll talk about that in a minute and then career trajectory it's easy for me to say one of Crick Viz's first employees signed joined part-time then full-time then head of performance analysis at Crick Viz for seven years lead analyst for Oval Invincibles in the hundred team analyst for the Royal Challengers bangalore and then it's got that mistake of well you were england white ball analyst replacing nathan lehman but you're not that anymore so it's sort of slightly out of date any other any other red flags before we go and we talk properly and we'll move away from claude in a minute but i'm interested in what i defend it in the only thing it said about my age was it said 28 at time of appointment as england analyst which was correct and then if you just do the maths from there it would take you to 31.

8:25So that was sort of wrong, but not quite wrong. But generally, that's a pretty decent summary. I think it's more probably my own, you know, I'm sort of being a bit modest in thinking there would be that much information about me on the internet. And there seemingly was enough for it to pull together a fairly decent biography. So but yeah, that the rest of the information there is largely correct in it. And, and the message... Freddie, I've run this on much less interesting people than you. And, you know, it is incredible how much information is out there on all of us. Well, that was the thing.

8:55There were a few details around, I can't recall exactly what they were now, but there were a few details in the sort of, in the text further down that I was impressed that it had sort of managed to get those bits. So obviously there's the basic, like who you work for, what have you done? You know, what was your career trajectory, which you can probably get off LinkedIn and various social media sites and whatever but it was there were bits of detail in there which also just indicated that you know I suppose it is obviously as it does trawling the web for for those sort of nuggets that flesh out what's otherwise biographical information with a little bit more nuanced and contextualized stuff and there are also some interesting topics raised you know around cricket analytics and the industry which I'm sure we'll get into today you know it sort of it tapped into a few interesting areas and it's certainly thought provoking i find sometimes it's useful what i find is if i ask chat gpt a question or things like that it's not that it necessarily produces something new but it's it's that it might it's a good way of checking that you've not missed anything you know so if you were like to be like searching what is the future of cricket analytics for example you might come up with four points and then actually there's a fifth pretty decent sized point that you've not got and therefore it sort of draws attention to it so it's quite useful as almost like a checker to make sure you haven't missed something obvious And I thought that did a fairly good job of summarising some interesting topics, which, as I said, we'll probably get into.

10:15The most interesting, I think, place to start with this is the decision you made, Freddie, to go from cricket journalism into cricket analytics by joining CrickViz. Could you give us a bit of an oversight into what that was at that point? Because although we're talking about this is only 10 years ago, we're going to discover that quite a lot has changed in that time. Yeah, I mean, I think it's useful to understand a little bit about like cricket analysis as a role as well, because it has existed probably in some shape or form for around 20 years or so, like as a sort of role, but it didn't really gain much prominence until around 2010.

10:53And then around 2015, 2016, it started to really pick up, I think maybe a little bit earlier. so in the early 2010s I was acting largely as a journalist or freelance journalist I was working whilst at university writing for a number of cricket websites like Crickinfo, All Out Cricket which is a magazine, Wisdom Cricket Monthly things like that doing basically basically I was sort of beginning to pursue a career in journalism which as you've already pointed out something my dad did my dad is a cricket journalist and I guess I sort of I was interested in that I knew enough about cricket that I felt like it was a more fun way of earning money than working in a pub which is what many of my mates were doing so I was doing I did that really just because it was a hobby or it was something of an interest and it began to develop into something more where I was being paid but the shift to analysis happened as I said at the same time where analysis suddenly started becoming more of a role like if you'd spoken to me in 2010 let's say I probably wouldn't have even I would have hardly known it existed as a role and again the Claude summary Richard that you sent through drew attention to Nathan Lehman, who I did replace as an analyst, who was probably the first analyst to gain sort of a bit of a reputation.

12:02And that was through probably 2010 to 2015, 16, when he worked for England. And England put a lot of the work that he did central to the way that they played cricket. And they had a lot of success, particularly under Andy Flower with Nathan playing a big role. So in that era, the role of analyst started to become more prominent. And another factor which we'll come on to as well is the rise of T20 and short form leagues that also necessitated the role of an analyst for reasons that we'll come on to. But when I was writing as a journalist, I started to focus more on T20 cricket because it was what I firstly, I thought it was the most interesting form of the game.

12:40And secondly, it was underreported relative to test cricket. Like even now, if you go to a hundred match, for example, there are very few, if any, journalists from a national newspaper in the media centre. But then if you go to a test match, the media center is full. So it was almost the fact that there was this big format that was super interesting, but no one was really writing about it. So I started to put more energy into doing that. and that led me towards analysis because T20 in particular I think is quite a difficult format to understand without at least some access to numbers to understand finer strengths and details and trends and patterns that are going on in the game that potentially are a bit more difficult to pick up unless you've got access to those numbers so it was that focus on T20 coupled with the relative lack of alternative sources of analysis that made me think, well, hang on, I think you need to have the numbers to get under the hood of this.

13:36And that led me to working a little bit more for CrickViz, which was, again, another company that I was working for on and off whilst being a journalist. And I just found it increasingly interesting. So one of the interesting bits, I remember what it was on, you're on Twitter, and I remember seeing you for the first time and started following you because of that, it felt like, and I put you in a group with Bopter Joe was around about that time as well. And they were coming out with really interesting snippets and just roots into stories from numbers. And I thought, okay, well, this is really interesting.

14:07And I started following you and you were doing really great stuff at that time. And so were you, and take this in entirely as praise, I'm just interested in, are you a geek who wanted to be a journalist? Or were you a journalist who have learned the geek stuff? Or have you, it's just sometimes people see it as a sort of art and science thing and it's interesting because we're going to go on to how far you've got in that world and people might assume you've got like a maths techie background well no so i'm not i would say i'm more of a i wouldn't use the term journalist but i was interested in the storytelling side of it trying to understand what was going on and that sort of goes back to the essence of i think good sports journalism is being able to explain, you know, what's happening, why it's happening.

14:54Why is this team good? Why are England suddenly winning? Or why are they losing? And that was sort of the essence of it, which I think is actually very similar to a lot of the work you do as an analyst, you're trying to understand why something's happening. So I guess those two things are similar. But the journalism aspect puts more of an emphasis on then telling the story. And you're right to probably draw attention to that early on when I was doing quite a lot of work on Twitter, I would use the numbers to try and enhance, well, I was doing it partly for my own benefit to understand the game.

15:22But I think it then was other people found it interesting, because they were like, Oh, okay, I understand that's why this is happening. Or this is why, you know, Chennai Super Kings are so successful in the IPL, Freddie's drawn attention to lots of numbers that indicate what it is that they're doing well. So that sort of search for the truth in inverted commas was was at the heart of what I did. I think even when I was doing it from a media perspective, it's just that what happened and will come on to this, I guess, is like, I found that the truths that I were uncovering were actually of value to the teams themselves.

15:55And therefore, I could make the transition from being someone who was writing about it to someone who was influencing it, and being on the other side of the fence. So maybe that's just because the industry itself and the game itself was a bit more nascent. And so I think what I found was that the work that I was doing on the media side was of interest to teams. And And maybe that's because maybe team side of it hadn't developed as much as I thought. It is a new format. And as I said, analysis was a relatively new thing. So to an extent, I think teams begun to be like, hang on a sec, this is quite valuable.

16:29And also from Crickviz's side, the work that we were doing, again, started around working with broadcasters and again, probably more storytelling. Actually, we started to recognize how to value on the performance side as well. So that transition happened for me at a similar time as it sort of happened for CrickViz as well. And CrickViz still do stuff in the media. But I was sort of, I guess, at the forefront of pushing CrickViz to try and do a little bit more work in the performance space because we quite quickly realized that's where there would be some value. And obviously, it's pretty exciting to be working in that area.

17:00Can you give us a bit of color about that? Because this is the thing I think lots of our listeners are going to find very interesting. Bearing in mind that this is the early days of analytics, CrickViz, as you can explain, is hired by franchises or international teams to give them some information which you then have to be what the conduit to pass this on to the players and persuade them that actually you know your numbers can tell them something about what they need to do that they perhaps haven't thought of which is potentially quite a confronting thing for a guy in his mid-20s yeah yeah i mean it's sort of i guess a bit of shedding a bit of light on the role of an analyst that that's kind of what you have to do your job is to look at the data and sometimes video it used to be more video base before data was sort of took hold and by that I mean there became more data sources your job was to using that evidence if you like pass it over to players or coaches to help them play better or to help make better decisions and you know the most basic example might be you arrive at a ground and the coach and the captain say to you look can you just give me the information on chasing or defending in night time t20s at this ground what should we do and you say well look the history says that you know of the last 20 t20 matches at this ground 15 have been won chasing that's the kind of information that then is fed into the coaches and the captain they go oh i think we win the toss today we'll probably chase the history for the venue is that and you'll hear captains referred to that sometimes at the toss and yeah that that's almost the most basic level of what you do but it varies from that into sort of my new bowling plans or field settings for specific batters so you're right that it's quite a big change from sort of presenting that information maybe in an article or in a tweet to then doing it with a team.

18:37But I found at least that the essence of what you're trying to do is the same. You're sort of, again, I'm hesitant to use the word storytelling because I feel like with teams, it's a little bit more dealing in facts. You don't want to be seen to be contorting the truth. But at the end of the day, if there is a strategy which you and the coaches, let's say, determine as being optimal, maybe it's a certain ball with a certain field, it's your job then to try and sort of not convince them to do it but sell the idea it's to say look this is what the numbers say this is what the evidence says and if you do this it's a method for success and that that that same sort of the communication there is is critical you know you can do all the work behind the scenes but if you're unable to convey the message in a way that convinces the the players or the coaches that it's valuable then it's kind of wasted time so So I felt like there was enough similarities in what I did in the media to what I now do with teams for it to sort of be a relatively seamless transition.

19:34There's been some challenges along the way and it's different. And certainly working in a high performance environment with a lot of really talented athletes is very different to tapping away on your laptop in your bedroom. But there are enough crossovers that I think I managed to do it relatively effectively. I'm thinking particularly in the early days and probably less so now, but I will talk about that. In terms of the, what would you call them, the barriers for that information to be penetrated? There's a lot of people in sport who want, you know, it's about gut and instinct and, you know, personal ownership of their performance.

20:07And then there's this shift towards, actually, am I giving over responsibility for performance to you, Freddie, and the coach? And we're seeing it's not just a cricket specific thing, but there's, you know, across all sports, this tension. So you've got the initial money ball sort of era and cricket was quite early to that for obvious reasons because it was quite applicable. And now the end of this question is, is there a sort of slight shift back in terms of, no, we want control back? Has there been that sort of dynamic at play? There definitely is. And I think it sort of varies between different teams, different players, different coaches.

20:49and there's a lot of different philosophies as to how best to deal with it. 15 years ago, you didn't need to have a philosophy as to how to handle data within your dressing room or analysis within your dressing room. Nowadays, every major coach in T20 leagues and international teams around the world will have an approach that they have towards how they deal with that role. Some people, I mean, I would say almost every team will have an analyst. In fact, I would say that almost confidently that every major team around the world will have an analyst now. The extent of their involvement varies massively.

21:25Some instances, they are very much in the background. They are asked questions and they respond to them when asked, but they don't really get involved in strategy or selection or match day tactics to any great degree. but they exist and then at the other end of the spectrum there'll be times when analysts are front and center of selection meetings of discussions of planning of dugout decisions and you know that there is a huge range of different approaches I don't think that there is a particular shift within the entire game I think it's more between different coaches you could work for one team where you're utilized massively and you could go and work for a coach a different coach who could utilize you hardly at all and that's just the way that that it goes and i think the coach the coach analyst relationship is of is an important one in the modern day game or coach sometimes director of cricket as well particularly when you're thinking about recruitment so i mean historically you talk about coach captain that's definitely a dynamic but i think increasingly the analyst coach and analyst doc relationship goes quite a long way to shaping the kind of team that a side is not necessarily if like you and an average person was sat in the stands watching they would necessarily notice the difference but in terms of the inner functionings of the side and how it operates how many meetings they have how detailed their training sessions are the kind of cricket they want to play quite a lot of the time the relationship between the analyst and the coach and doc will be significant for those things that then flow off that i think it's interesting because you're sort of seeing it you know there's lots of case studies that are popping up man united being an obvious one where you've got this you know the inner sanctum as you say is the coach sort of manager the director of football and then you've got this issue of the data guy you know whether it's dan ashworth or someone what do you do about that and do you see those two roles the analyst merging into the director of football is that always i'm not i'm not i'm talking about the sports specific stuff because there is a sort of crossover there or do you always need a church and Yeah, I think, I mean, yes, in that I think that there are, you know, people who work their way up to be like head of analysis departments are often minded in a way that would probably mean they would also be quite effective in director of football or director of cricket sports.

23:48However, I think that there will always be, it's not like the role of analyst is just going to disappear, because I think there's almost the role for you as an analyst is to represent what the evidence is pointing to. So that might be just pure data or it might be data science. And you are there to be the voice or the mouthpiece of that information. And you're meant to contribute that to the debate. Now, the director of cricket or the director of football is then someone that you debate with. And they will probably be quite analytically minded a lot of the time because they just normally are. But I think that that relationship between them is essential.

24:21Like you won't you won't see one disappear. It's a sort of back and forth and a to and fro. And I might say, look, the data says this and the DOC or the director of football might come back and say, yeah, I know, but we've got to judge the human element of this. Or, you know, there are other factors at play, psychological factors that maybe the data isn't necessarily representing. So there's give and take from both sides, I think. And that means that the debate between the two is essential. It's interesting. It's a bit like I can see a sort of echo. You remember COVID, those press conferences and you go over to Jonathan Van Tam and he would be saying, you know, and the minister would say we'll be led by the science.

24:55And there was all of that palaver going on. So there's an interesting dynamic. I was going to actually ask about the data itself, because I imagine that certainly on 2020, the amount that's available and the richness of that data must have changed a lot over the past decade, which then means you can be perhaps more confident about the conclusions that it's giving you. Can you talk us a bit about where the data comes from, how it's changed, and how your relationship with it has evolved over the 10 years. Yeah, there's a... I mean, cricket has always been rich in data in that there are so many individual events.

25:33And so every single ball itself is a piece of data in various shapes or forms. In the most simple form, it's just how many runs were scored off that ball. But obviously, there's a lot more granular data that's come into the game in the last 10, 15 years. And really, the rise of the accessibility of that data has been a big reason why analysts have become more prominent. The main one really is ball tracking data. That is the sort of the most valuable data set that you can get as an analyst at this stage. That came in with the advent of Hawkeye in the sort of early 21st century, but then increasingly towards the latter 2000s when DRS became like, it had to exist in international cricket.

26:13It was a prerequisite. Every game then had ball tracking data from that match, whether it's the test match, ODI, T20 International, and increasingly now, as they've become bigger, domestic T20 leagues. And that data is, again, the data that Nathan Lehman really used at the beginning of his career, I think, that sort of helped England gain an edge was by aggregating that data, they could start to identify patterns in ways that players played. You know, they can find weaknesses in opposition batters or strengths in their own players and harness that data for the better. So that's the first starting point or the key cornerstone of the rise of analysis has been the fact that for every single ball, we can say the speed, the line, the length, how much it swung, how much it seemed, how much it spun.

26:55And obviously, when that data becomes aggregated, you've got an extremely valuable overview of a player's ability, particularly when you're looking at opposition batters. You can say, well, this is where you should bowl or this is where you shouldn't bowl. And then the other, so that's point one. The other thing that's really interesting and has really accelerated the rise of analysis, I think has been the advent of auctions and drafts and T20 cricket more generally, all of which have probably necessitated more analysis than test cricket. So firstly, drafts and auctions, you need to know how good a player is and how much we should pay for it.

27:28That's a question, or pay for them. That's a question that cricket never had to really answer prior to the IPL or prior to these drafts. You just basically, you still, you try and work out who was good to pick your best test team or your best ODI team. But knowing the value of a player was a new thing. and so quantifying that through various models and i should say at this point that there's a rise of data scientists as well as data analysts and they're slightly different things and the data scientists would build models to try and identify who was good and who wasn't um and then t20 cricket in particular because of its nature it's a shorter game the margins are finer it's partly why it's more entertaining the gains that can be achieved through analysis are more notable if you play test cricket for five days, more often than not, the better team will just win because they probably have the better players or they play better.

28:17But in a T20 game, a small change in your tactics can be the difference between victory and defeat. And obviously that can happen in close test matches or close ODI. But just by its nature, if you look at the margin of results, T20 cricket is closer. So those things, ball tracking technology, auction and drafts, and the rise of T20 in particular, all have sort of made analysis certainly more prominent. So as we alluded to in our AI-assisted introduction, you have worked with and still do work with the Ogilvall Invincibles in 100 and RCB in the IPL. Can you tell us a little bit about what, when you're working with these teams and you've got matches every three to four days, what the build-up, what the work actually involves for like the time in between the matches leading up to kind of game day itself and yeah of course like yeah so so i'll probably lean more on my experience with rcb because it's just slightly more recent and fresh in the memory in terms of how we went about it but it was and every team is different in how they do this as i said that there's no sort of one size fits all way of using an analyst but what we would do at rcb is we would meet you know let's say we're playing a game on saturday almost a week before then the coaches maybe even therefore one game ahead we might have a game in between this but we're preparing for the game the following you know later in the week we would sit down as coaches so there's me and then the batting coach bowling coach fielding coach head coach director of cricket and we would have what we sort of called coaches or planning meetings and for that I will do a lot of prep work for those meetings so I will prepare very detailed sort of data slides if you like and footage to sort of illustrate the players strengths weaknesses tendencies where they like to score their runs how they get out where they can be slowed down and there's a lot of different ways you can slice that data up and I pull that together it takes quite a lot of time so that's done in advance but we then sit down with the coaches we go through that I normally will lead it but then a discussion will unfold where it sort of it goes off in all kinds of directions you might have someone say well can we go back to the game the other day I feel like I noticed something from that match and we start to we probably talk about each player for you know between 30 minutes and sometimes it's five minutes sometimes it might be 30 minutes 45 minutes even for some players and that meeting will total you know however many hours and at the end of it we're looking to try and drill it down to one or two bullet points of key information so for example for our opening bowler where's he going to bowl is he going to look to swing it in or away what two fielders are he going to have out should he maybe use his bouncer there'll be just little nuggets that we then pass over to the players and that's generally again different teams do it in different ways but we did it often in like a one-on-one meeting with me and the bowling coach and then the bowler and we would sit down and talk through their options and the two bullet points that we'd come up with would obviously be sort of the product of that meeting and we do a similar thing for batters although we wouldn't do one-on-ones with batters it was more of a group discussion but but that's sort of the fine amount or opposition planning but in in that meeting as well we'll talk about selection which is sort of all tied into these things there might be a certain weakness and it means we need to include a certain type of bowler so it's that it's that big coaching meeting that then drills down into a one-on-one bowling meeting and then a group batting meeting that's how how we do that but there are lots of different ways of going about it it's really fascinating sorry you go mike i've got you go just a quick one so on you mentioned there's a whole spectrum of different ways in which teams work with analysts more or less integrated to me that the rcb example he's given us sounds at the integrated end of the spectrum is that yeah definitely that so that's and that's partly why it's a better example because there are other teams where i might have done less that sort of shows what you can do at one end of the spectrum i'm not i don't think it's like ott i would i would never sort of say we were doing a lot of meetings or we would spend a lot of time preparing but that was the way that the guys who run that team wanted to do it but I would agree that that is slightly towards the integrated side I've got a question about the auction but first of all what's it like I mean you sort of see occasional snippets of behind the scenes during the auction what just give me a sense of was it incredibly stressful exciting I can't imagine being in that environment it's stressful and exciting both in a positive way I mean you get nervous before the auction and just like you could imagine players getting nervous before a game you know a huge amount of prep goes into not only the auction but firstly your retentions which you decide how many players you're going to retain sometimes you can only retain three or four in in mini auction years you can retain as many as you want but that's when the the analysis work starts and you know you've poured hours and hours of time and lots of thought and sometimes yeah long meetings in in into this event and then ultimately sort of then it starts and it's a bit yeah it's a bit like preparing for a for probably for a big game or a big exam and there is naturally there are nerves i remember when i did my first one you're more nervous than i am now it's a bit more familiar even just the simple things like you get to the table and you've got to sort of find your plugs under the table plug your laptop notebook there's sort of food everywhere and you understand how you know there's cameras there's lights you sort of get familiar with that and the first time it's a bit like whoa this is kind of crazy and then after a while it's just sort of like it's a bit like the same first time i worked in a dugout the first time you get there you're like whoa this is mental and now it's just just another day at the office kind of thing it becomes increasingly common that said because auctions only happen you know drafts only happen once twice a year and in the ipl's case you do one every year you know i've done four now whereas i've been involved in 50 60 70 games so they're still there's still a novelty factor to them and they're certainly nerve-wracking on the day but if you've done your prep and you're you're well organized then actually generally hopefully you just follow your plan rather than having to be too nimble sometimes you need to be nimble but we're lucky rcb we've got a really good group of coaches and and director of cricket who are very organized and i generally never go into it thinking we're not prepared there's a differentiation question in my mind in terms of what's the difference when everyone's got the has everyone got the same data is one question are you making better decisions and and are you judged on you know in football again the obvious analogy you know I live in Brighton where the story of the last five years has been it's been an analyst's story essentially it's been Tony Bloom knows something because he's in betting and he's got this secret sauce model that identifies players around the world and sells them to Chelsea all of that carries with it enormous credit to whoever's in your job is the same scenario is the return on investment in your job linked to the player acquisition question well firstly I'd say just with regards to the last point the the area where an analyst can make most difference or to be honest anyone involved in strategy for a team is at the auction table.

35:27Like if you were to ask the biggest reason why we, or why teams win in T20 cricket, it's because they compile good teams, which is part of the skill. And then obviously then you have to go out there and win the games of cricket. But if you're an analyst seeking to make a difference, it's when you're building the team or involved in building the team that you can make the biggest gains. So it's a hugely important event. Does everyone have the same data? Yes and no, in that you've got access to the same data, but the data science and the modeling on top of it is where the difference comes in, I think, at the moment.

36:01There are some data sources which other teams might have access to or some teams might not, like finer details, and we might come on to it, but things like fielder positioning, for example, at the moment is cricket. It is a data source that is beginning to come in, but not everyone might have their hands on it. It probably doesn't make that much of a difference to the recruitment. It's probably more of a match day thing. that's where that has value so i think the the models that people build and there are lots of different companies involved in doing that kind of thing are generally drawing upon the same data sets it's what you do with the data and that's where the data science really becomes valuable that has real value but also i think as well there's an element of over complicating some of the auctions like you can have fantastic data science that might be able to identify really good future prospects or undervalued talent but like sometimes a good auction is a lot more simple than that it might just be around how you spend your money how you distribute your money through your playing 11 the extent to which you go to certain limits and almost just how like calm you can be in terms of trying to assemble a team that has strengths across various disciplines it might be that that that someone has the best auction sometimes is just that rather than some another team who might have a super smart algorithm that can identify players that maybe we had missed that's great but it might not end up with a team being as well-rounded as someone else and i think sometimes common sense goes a long way particularly in the ipl where there's still a lot of emotion involved in a lot of teams yeah it's fascinating i'm really interested in this idea about the knowledge we have of 2020 becoming so much richer because when you first got involved in this part of the demand i think for amlis was because we still weren't really sure how to win 2020 games because lots of the metrics that we were using for test and one-day cricket just weren't appropriate anymore uh i think you might have written about this in your book of the year winning which claude mentioned but we didn't mention we we glossed over i don't know why we did that but yeah we should we should give that uh book it's it's due but the point being that we've got a much richer understanding now of 2020 partly because we've just got some more years of data what i'm fascinating can you think of any examples of where the data has kind of where you've kind of changed your mind over the years on like a key aspect of how this works of like what you need to be pursuing what you might give greater weight to now than you perhaps did before as a result of the fact that we just know more about it?

38:34Yeah, I mean, one area that I think is still evolving is, so for obviously the last five, ten years has seen a rapid growth in the number of T20 tournaments that there are around the world. And I think about, let's say, ten years ago, let's just use that as an example, or 2016, which I think quite often when I've been talking about in the past, I've used that as kind of a watershed moment for analysis From that point onwards, it started to become prominent. Around about then, if you started looking at sort of the T20 leagues around the world, there'd be the Big Bash, the CPL, the IPL, the T20 Blast.

39:10There was the PSL. There were probably four or five tournaments. Now, generally, they were all of pretty good standards. And like the best overseas players would probably go and play in most of them. You'd see them travel around the world and play. Generally, it's the same sort of cast of players playing. And I think it was a bit easier to be quite confident if you just aggregated the numbers from those tournaments, let's just say the IPL, BBL, PSL, Blast and CPL, those five, if you aggregated them, you could be like, well, if players are doing well in these tournaments, they're a pretty good player.

39:39Now, because of the rapid growth of number of leagues that there are, you'll see there's a far greater range of standards from the IPL at the top to leagues like the MLC in America or the ILT20 in the UAE, where you can have some of the world's very best players playing alongside, in the ILT20's case, some United Arab Emirates cricketers who might be quite talented, but really are nowhere near in the same league as the Rashid Khans or Andre Russells who they're playing alongside. So what you find is that there's a massive gulf between the good players and the bad players in a lot of these leagues.