Team Building | Behavioral Biases | Data Contextualization

The World Cup or any ICC Event for that matter represents a unique opportunity to evaluate the Sport. While the Cricket’s Foray into America is a big topic of discussion, I am going to talk about something a little closer to my heart. That subject is Team Building.

We live in an era where we can consume information and knowledge constantly. For example, the success of the Los Angeles Dodgers, Manchester City, the Golden State Warriors, the New England Patriots, and other leading sports organizations around the world is available to us. Despite its availability, Team Building and the application of Best Practices remain foreign to Cricket.

Few if any Cricket Boards, Franchise T20 Teams, or Domestic Teams have successfully developed a Team Building Process. Building Teams in Cricket is a combination of Recency Bias, Confirmation Bias, Poor Data Contextualization, and Reverse Disposition Effect. I suspect that most Cricket Teams and Primary Cricket Decision-Makers are unaware of these behavioral biases. In fact history suggests that they lean into them. For example, Form should be a small factor in the Team Building Process. But in Cricket, Form is King. If a player goes on a good run of games he’s immediately selected.

I want to end with an example. Pakistan selected 5 Openers for the T20 World Cup. England selected 4 Openers for the T20 World Cup. This is an example of Poor Data Contextualization. If you look at the generic run-scoring lists from any T20 Competition, the highest run getters will always be the Openers because they have the opportunity to face the most deliveries and operate with 0 wickets down. It’s an easy position to accumulate positive data. The result of that analysis shouldn’t be 4 or 5 Openers in the Starting XI because that ignores the different traits or attributes required for each position. Batting with 2 Wickets Down in the 8th Over against Spin requires a different skill set to the one required to bat with 0 Wickets Down in the 1st Over against Pace. That isn’t to say that we’ve made no progress. The advent of T20 Cricket and the ingress of private money has helped in inject new voices and ideas. But we have the potential to make more progress faster.

Finally, there’s been a lot of criticism on the ICC for spending $30M on a Stadium Facility in New York, Ticket Prices, Pitches, Schedules, and Logistics. Some of the criticism is fair and easily correctable. But some of the criticism is unwarranted. This World Cup is an Investment and in my opinion it’s been a success. The next checkpoint is going to be MLC Season 2 and the Re-Organization of USA Cricket.

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