The degree of difficulty in cricket
By: Garfield Robinson
In a few sporting disciplines, diving and gymnastics for example, each skill or routine has what is termed a “degree of difficulty”. This is a measure of the relative complexity or risk involved in each move, or each series of moves, and it is factored into the scoring of a performance.
In diving, for instance, the straight, forward somersault from the one metre springboard has a 1.6 degree of difficulty. The backward version of the same dive, on the other hand, has a higher rating of 1.7. This means that a participant gets a higher mark for the backward dive if they are both perfectly executed.
There should be something similar in cricket. Few games are as significantly affected by external factors - such as the state of the batting surface and weather conditions – as cricket.
Putting the quality of the opposition aside for a moment - should a hundred made on a featherbed in Antigua be worth the same as one on a seaming Headingley? Should wickets captured by a spinner in Perth, where the ball almost always travels in a straight line, be counted the same as those collected on a minefield in Nagpur?
There is much information to be gleaned from a scorecard. But a scorecard deals only in numbers; it does not offer perspective. We sometimes scold a batter seen pushing and poking and playing and missing without fully appreciating the difficulty of batting in that environment.
Or we’ll see a bowler making little impact on a very benign surface and think he’s bowling abysmally. A system that utilizes context in assessing the play would surely offer valuable insight. It would make for a more meaningful system of rating the relative quality of players’ performances.
It would also, to be sure, place an unwelcome layer of complexity upon an already complex game. Ideally, however, it would be helpful to have every performance framed by the circumstances under which they occur, and it would highlight the special qualities of the players who consistently excel in tough conditions.
Last May I watched England score a flood of runs during the Trent Bridge Test against Zimbabwe. The hosts rattled up a gigantic 565/6 declared, made off 96.3 overs. Both openers scored hundreds – Ben Duckett 132 and Zak Crawley 115 while Ollie Pope scored 171. The only batter who could be said to have failed was Joe Root who was dismissed for 32 and captain Ben Stokes who made 28. In this period of Bazball their 5.86 run-rate was not unprecedented, but it was startling just the same and spoke to the ease with which the batters scored.
The following month India arrived on England’s shores to play for the Anderson/Tendulkar trophy staffed with higher quality bowlers. Unsurprisingly, they provided a much sterner examination of the home team’s batters. To anyone who witnessed the two visiting teams in action it was clear that scoring runs against India was much more difficult than scoring runs against Zimbabwe.
At points during the series Bazball was totally jettisoned, especially in the third Test where there was a spell of 28 dot balls. And so, shouldn’t runs against India be priced higher than runs against Zimbabwe?
Some years ago, a group of “25 cricketers, broadcasters, writers, and statisticians,” according to ESPNcricinfo, voted Laxman’s 59 and 281 against Australia at Kolkata in 2001, the best performance in Test cricket history.
It’s not hard to understand why. India followed on 274 behind and were still 222 adrift when Laxman arrived at the wicket.
What followed was 281 of the most handsome and consequential runs anyone could ever wish to witness, as bowlers of the caliber of Shane Warne and Glen McGrath were carted all over the Eden Gardens, in a wonderful display of back-to-the-wall batting.
Now, compare Laxman’s knock to, say, Brian Lara’s world records in Antigua. His 375 and 400 not out were monumental efforts. They were extraordinary feats of endurance and skill and focus. But they were made on featherbeds and both matches ended in draws, and would have probably required at least two additional days to eke out a result.
Much more recently, South Africa’s Wiaan Mulder smashed an unbeaten 367 on a flat surface in Bulawayo against a rather tame Zimbabwe attack. Considering that Mulder, who was captain, declared when he was within reach of Lara’s world record Test score and with loads of time left in the game, might suggest he didn’t think he deserved the record under those circumstances. Perhaps he thought it was all too easy.
Other great performances that came against strong odds would include Michael Holding’s 14 for 149 on a totally lifeless Oval surface in 1976. There was also Graham Gooch’s unbeaten 154 against the might of West Indian fast bowling in gloomy conditions at Headingley in 1991; Ian Botham’s 149, again at Headingley, as England overcame 500-1 odds to beat Australia despite following on; and Brian Lara’s 213 in Jamaica and 153 in Barbados, both played during Australia’s 1999 tour of the Caribbean.
In sports, as in life, the most telling accomplishments are the ones achieved against all probability. Leicester City’s 2015-16 Premier League win was universally lauded because it was thought an impossibility. That is the kind of sporting achievement that we all live to experience.
Cricketers, and sportsmen in general, are expected to perform well when the environment is favourable. The truly great performance, however, can only ever occur against overwhelming odds.
Australian batter Don Bradman was, simply, the best batter ever. His average of 99.94 is scarcely believable, considering that it is almost 40 runs better than the next in line. And yet, according to his contemporary Jack Fingleton, who went on to become a distinguished writer, Bradman was but a shadow of himself when asked to perform on a wet wicket.
This is what he said in Cricket Crisis, his book on Bodyline: “…I hasten to add now that all this concerned Bradman the great of the Good Wicket. In that category he stood alone. He was towering, majestic, omniscient – till the patter, patter on his palace roof told him the rains had arrived. Then he put off his majestic plumes and stole out to mix with the rabble, his features indistinguishable in the ranks of the wet-wicket mediocrities.”
To be fair, it wasn’t that Bradman didn’t have the ability to do better on wet wickets. Fingleton just thought he couldn’t be bothered, that he knew the good wicket would come along soon enough and he’d return to his gluttonous ways.
West Indies batting great and contemporary of Bradman, George Headley, negotiated wet wickets much better. In Beyond A Boundary, CLR James compares their record on wet wickets. He examines 15 wet-wicket innings in which Bradman passed 50 only once and averaged 16.66 and then points to 13 wet-wicket innings in which Headley passed 50 seven times and averaged 39.85.
By this evidence Headley was better on wet wickets. James even relates that a famed cricket journalist at the time offered that “Headley had good claims to be considered on all wickets the finest of the inter-war batsmen”.
This was an assessment with which James couldn’t agree, but accepted the point that Headley excelled when batting was at its hardest and should be given some credit for excelling under difficult conditions.
There is much information available in the game today. We can now measure the degree of seam and swing movement for each delivery and calculate what level of movement in what direction is more likely to lead to more dismissals.
We know the exact spot on which each ball lands and what length is most effective. All that data, allied with some gauge of the strength of the opposition could form the basis of some measurement scale of the degree of difficulty for batting and bowling for each game or each innings or each session etc.
This would be a novel approach somewhat, especially for a team game. Whenever Arsenal defeats Liverpool or Manchester City, teams normally appearing at the top of the English Premier League, they are awarded the same number of points as if they defeated the team at the very bottom of the standings.
Having said all that, we should acknowledge that cricket has taken some steps to add context to team performance in international games. Teams in the World Test Championship (WTC) now get more points for beating higher ranked teams and for winning away from home.
This needs to be significantly expanded because the good player is not necessarily the player who grabs buckets of wickets or makes mountains of runs when everything is in his or her favour. It is the one who scores runs on a bad wicket or takes wickets on a good one.
It is not the player who dominates weak opponents. It is the one who puts up good numbers against the strongest teams. Adding some degree of difficulty metric for each performance provides context. The greatest feats are those that overcome the greatest obstacles.
Cricket should find a way to reflect that.