Here's An Idea: On Home Advantage... and then cricket

In sports, home advantage is a complex phenomenon that cannot be reduced to a single cause.

Home advantage is one of those ideas that is more universally accepted, yet less understood. It is taken as a natural part of virtually every sport code, and at all levels of competition from social contests to elite professional level. Teams have ensured that home grounds are fortresses.

And over the past few decades, researchers have tried to uncover the reasons behind this phenomenon.

A number of factors have been brought forward as contributors, and one of those factors is the presence of the home crowd. It is said that the home crowd encourages and inspires the home team to play well. Proponents of this theory note that the home advantage increases with noise and crowd density.

A study by Kai Fischer and Justus Haucap found that a number of teams suffered a reduced home advantage when football returned to empty stadia due to the coronavirus pandemic. "The more a team has been used to a full stadium, the more severe is the loss of home advantage," they wrote.

Another study found that in the absence of crowds, football referees awarded significantly fewer sanctions against the away teams, and home teams created significantly fewer attacking opportunities when they played without fans. (Home Advantage during the COVID-19 Pandemic in European football") This finding is in line with the view that officials also added to a team's home advantage.

Bias by match officials, referees and umpires, has been cited as a possible driver of home advantage. Visiting officials have been noted to be more lenient on home teams than away teams.

Travel fatigue and routine disruption have also been noted as a contributor to home advantage. In contrast to their visiting competitors, home performers are more easily able to maintain their routines of practice and rest. Familiarity with surroundings has also often been added to these factors.

Of Mice And Men

In 2010, Matthew Fuxjager of The Fuxjager Lab which studies the physiological and evolutionary bases of complex animal behaviour, conducted an experiment to study the fighting habits of territorial mice.

For his first experiment, Fuxjager gave mice three winning experiences (fights against smaller mice) in their home cage. Then he gave half of these mice another fight in their home cage and the other half a fight in an unfamiliar cage — all against bigger mice. The mice that had the fourth fight in their home cage won 100 per cent of the time. Among the mice that had the fourth fight in the unfamiliar cage? They won a paltry 40 per cent of the time.

Fuxjager found a similar result among mice without previous winning experience. He subjected such rookies to a single fight, again against larger opponents. Half of the mice had their first fight in their home cage, whereas the other half debuted in an unfamiliar cage. In these maiden fights, mice won 40 per cent of the time in their home environment but only 10 per cent of the time away from home.

Beyond wins and losses, the mice also exhibited different brain chemistry when fighting at home. The testosterone that courses through the body acts through androgen receptors, basically bodily sensors. The more receptors there are, the greater the effect of testosterone. In Fuxjager’s studies, regardless of where a fight occurred, there was an increase in androgen receptors in one region of the brain. But in two brain regions—the nucleus accumbens and the ventral tegmental area, which govern motivation and reward reinforcement, respectively—the receptor level increased only if the mouse had its dispute at home.

When mice fought at home, they were more aggressive and won more often. A lot more often. And having prior experience at winning greatly enhanced the home advantage even further.

Testosterone

Julian J. Edney conducted a study that has similar findings in human beings as Fuxjager's study in mice.

In his study, "Territoriality and Control", Edney found that participants felt better, safer in their own rooms than elsewhere. The study found out that male students involved in decision-making tasks exert more control and behave more assertively when the session happens in their own room, even if they had not been appointed to a position of control. It would not be out of line to suggest that all the above do go a long way in feelings of motivation, self-efficacy and collective team belief when it comes to athletes and sports teams.

Testosterone has also been cited as another reason home fields give teams an advantage. Researchers have found that athletes’ testosterone levels are higher before home games than before road games, perhaps a vestige of ancestral tribes protecting their territory against outsiders.

Nick Neave and Sandy Wolfson, tested testosterone levels of football players at training, just before a home game and just before an away game. They found that they had significantly high salivary testosterone levels before a home game than an away game. In fact, there was little difference in testosterone levels just before training and an away game, though the levels for the away game were slightly higher.

With increased testosterone levels comes a greater willingness to take risks, improve reaction times, enhanced aspects of spatial ability and increased muscle metabolic rate of muscles.

Home Advantage In Cricket

In cricket, the home advantage goes even further than the above-mentioned factors. It is all that plus climate, altitude and other innate characteristics found in each country, AND the pitch. Even without much trying, each country naturally produces pitches that are unique to them, in the main, because of the just mentioned factors.

This is what determines how the majority play cricket. Countries like South Africa and Australia have consistently produced some of the best seamers by the bucket-load because of their natural conditions. As a result, home teams have always tried to make sure that the pitches give as much assistance to home bowlers, and that their batters thrive, as possible.

Spin friendly pitches in the subcontinent, seam friendly pitches in Australia and South Africa, green tracks in England and New Zealand... Teams are choosing, and rightly so, to play to their strengths.

However, for years, teams have gradually veered away from letting the ground staff have full control over the preparation of the wicket. Curators are no longer independent, but merely an extension of their national team. And the more that this happens, the less likely that visiting teams will win on away tours, unless if they are playing against a lower-ranked team.

Teams have routinely doctored pitches, and gone just far enough to escape ICC citation. But, even though the International Cricket Council receives reports from the umpires on the condition of the pitch, a surface generally has to be extraordinary for the hosts to be cited.

Granted, teams compete to win, to dominate, but at what point is ensuring a home advantage going a bit too far? When does it become so lopsided that it ceases to be a reasonably fair contest between bat and ball, a fair exhibition of skill, and disintegrates into a simple act of sabotage against a visiting team?

India's last two Tests have been overshadowed by allegations of pitch doctoring. And this discourse has generally made it seem as if it is only India who is guilty of doing all they can to ensure victory. They are just playing a game that everyone is playing, preparing pitches that give them the biggest advantage.

Is it right? No. Does it kill the format? Yes. Because as physicist Yaneer Bar-Yam says, complex systems like sports require a certain level of fair competitiveness to remain relevant.

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