How do we measure success in cricket?

Is success determined by the number of wins or by the quality of opposition that a captain or leads their team in?

Losing Despite Our Best Efforts and How Outcome Bias Works

Predicting The Future: What Stands Out Average or Strike Rate?

This past week I saw a claim that made me ask myself, how do we measure the success of a leader, a captain or a coach?

The prompt to that was innocuous enough, it was a number of tweets from a few writers and commentators suggesting that Asghar Afghan the most successful T20 captain of all time.

"Asghar Afghan is now the most successful men's T20 captain of all time. Under his leadership, Afghanistan has won 42 matches, more than India under MS Dhoni, who won 41," the tweets read.

No doubt, Asghar has clearly won more matches as captain, but can he be classified as the most successful T20 captain? Much more successful than MS Dhoni who has 1 less win than him? Well, it's an extraordinary claim.

Claims and comparisons as extraordinary as this one are not uncommon, every other week someone is parading a captain or coach's win percentage as proof of the fact that they are greater than someone else. "Coach X of Team Q has a 56% win ratio, therefore they are more successful than Coach Y of Team P who has a 47% win ratio...

The thing with extraordinary claims is that they should not be taken at face value, and they require extraordinary evidence to be taken seriously.

One of the best tools that I recently became aware of that can put such a claim to the test is Bill James' Pythagorean Expectations (PE) formula. Bill James, a baseball writer and analyst developed this formula in the early 1980s, and this led me to question why there is no such formula in cricket. It is more puzzling when you consider that baseball is the younger sibling. (Even though this is an article for another day, I think it is because baseball became more organised as a sport much earlier than cricket.)

With it, analysts assess a team's wins above expectation (WAE). Using the PE formula, they are able to calculate whether a team did better or worse than expected. With it, analysts can check if those wins above expectation were due to serendipitous circumstances, simple “luck,” or if it is the manager’s leadership that helped produce the wins when the team should have lost?

This calculation focuses on much more than the match outcomes, it helps to investigate just how well a team performed during the match.

But, because I lack the relevant data to make such calculations, I suggest we do this the "old school" way.

Old School Analysis

The obvious first question to be asked is the quality of opposition each captain has won against. A better captain, or a more successful captain, wins more matches against an opposition of equal calibre. There is no point in comparing the success of an international captain against that of a franchise captain. The level of competition they face is not the same, therefore the results would be meaningless.

Let me give a chess example. A more successful player is not the player with the most wins under their belt, but the one with the most wins against a higher level of opponent. This is even made more clear by the way in which their ratings are calculated.

If a player wins a tournament game their rating goes up, and if they lose a game, their rating goes down. If a player manages to draw against a higher-rated player their rating also rises, while drawing with a lower-rated player reduces it. If a player consistently beats a player with the same rating as theirs, then their rating rises and the losing player's rating will go down so that the ratings show that the consistently winning player has a higher probability of winning in the future.

Using chess ratings, there is no way a player with a rating of 1810 will be considered more successful than a player with a rating of 1970 because they won more tournament games by beating players ranked lower than 1808.

Afghanistan is ranked 7th and has consistently beaten teams ranked from number 8 to 20. India is ranked second, and under Dhoni, they have won against teams ranked lower than them and at times defeated the top-ranked team. (This is a hack of WAE in the absence of complete data.)

The fact that India under Dhoni has defeated teams ranked higher than them, we can only speculate that they performed above expectations.

Moving on from there, the next question that we ask is which of the two, Asghar and Dhoni, has won more titles. Not bilateral trophies, but tournaments where top teams compete. Dhoni has one of those, Ashgar is still to win one.

I provide the above considerations because it appears that people are confusing the fact that Asghar has won more matches than Dhoni as captain, and what it means to say Asghar is more successful than Dhoni. Of course, this would not warrant a short write-up if it was a discussion created by regular fans, it is expected. But, it becomes worrisome when writers and commentators do it.

There is a difference between the winningest captain and the most successful captain. The winningest captain simply has more wins and the most successful captain has more honours. And as of now, there is no indication that he won above expectations more than Dhoni or holds more titles than Dhoni.

This week’s articles:

Good decisions do not guarantee success, all they do is to give us the best possible chance for it. Therefore, judging decisions by their outcome does them a disservice. - Losing Despite Our Best Efforts and How Outcome Bias Works

A player’s average shows you what they have done, and their strike rate shows you what they can do, and it is from that that you can deduce potential. - Predicting The Future: What Stands Out Average or Strike Rate?

An Article From The Archives:

How many times have you seen a player do well under one coach and be inconsistent under another? Often, when that happens, we want to look at the tactics or have a closer look at the player’s technique. Rarely, though, do we consider the relationship between coach and player. Does it even matter? - Closer, Sharper, Better: The Value of Good Coach-Player Relationships

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