Hitting Against the Spin: How Cricket Really Works

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Some of the findings are in line with conventional cricketing wisdom but add a lot of value with granular breakup of data.

He might as well have been talking about himself - a Maths graduate and professor who ended up as the analytical brains behind the 2019 title winning England team.My interest in T20 has heightened after reading the chapters about data analysis in t20 tournaments which seem to create the best circumstances for data driven insight in cricket.

Only fifteen years ago it would have been difficult to answer them - cricket was guided only by decades-old tradition and received wisdom. And describing the dip from Tom Curran’s back-of-the-hand slower ball is fascinating, but the unit of measurement of acceleration is ms2, not ms-2. He is currently the Lead Analyst with the England One-Day and T20 teams, and Strategy Consultant for the Kolkata Knight Riders. The only cricket book they had that I didn’t already own was this one, so that meant it was the one I picked up.As far as Part 1 of the book is concerned however I have no hesitation in declaring that my initial misgivings on the subject of Hitting Against The Spin: How Cricket Really Works were entirely misconceived, and I have little doubt but that Part 2, which comprises around a third of the book’s bulk, will be just as fascinating to those who enjoy the T20 game. Strangely, the book contained only one reference, and a tangential one at that, to Duckworth-Lewis, a subject which I'm sure would have warranted an entire chapter of its own. And interestingly England, the land of fair play, actually did have less biased umpires before neutral umpires were mandated in international cricket. It has come far too late to have any impact on the way I play the game of course, but it will alter the way I watch it and, more importantly, the judgments I come to about what I see. Very likely you will learn something from this regardless of how many years you've played, coached or watched cricket in all its forms.

I was intrigued by this book as it covered aspects of cricket that I hadn’t considered before and revealed stats that you wouldn’t expect. As a sport fan, it was incredibly insightful to see how data and technologies have and are being used in cricket to discover past trends about the game. The editing is where this falls down, plenty of poorly-executed visuals with sub-standard labelling, or cases where two visuals could be combined for greater effect. Easy to read and packed with illustrative diagrams, it manages to be both enjoyable and accessible to the newcomer who wants to understand the game better, and also shocking and absorbing to the expert. There were a couple of things to correct like the labelling of some charts and a more intuitive naming of T20 styles but along with the Duality chapter these were very minor gripes.There are charts and graphs and, as others have mentioned, some of these don't really enlighten me very much but one needs them in a book of this type. In addition the numbers that accompany the chapter on the apparent bias of most home umpiring decisions before the introduction of neutral officials are illuminating, if not surprising, as are the conclusions about DRS. Chapters were often linked to specific seasons or teams, which meant they had relatable case studies and weren't just abstract, and there was also less extrapolation of what could happen in future. Leading cricket thinkers Nathan Leamon and Ben Jones lift the lid on international cricket and explain its hidden workings and dynamics - the forces that shape cricket and, in turn, the cricketers who play it.