Live Blogging: 20/20 Australia v. South Africa Match 2

Well that was just as enjoyable as the first game and it was nice to have Brendon along for a small part of it. Perhaps a bit less statistics than I’d intended, and certainly less on bowling after I concluded that bowling average is pretty good just the way it is. I’m convinced, though, by [...]

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Live blogging: Advance notice

Well, judging by the blog stats last night’s 20/20 live blogging was well-received, even if no-one wanted to leave a comment; I certainly had fun, so I’ll be repeating the exercise. Will try to get a bit more commentary in, as well as focussing inevitably on the conjugate problem of an accurate 20/20 bowling statistic.
Stumps [...]

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Live blogging: 20/20 Australia v. South Africa

Here’s a reverse chronological transcript of my live-blogging the 20/20 match. Actually there’s not much match commentary, because there are people on the television for that, but rather some ruminations on how the statistic(s) used for quantifying batting performance in this form should be modified.
22:34 Well, this is heading for an early finish, so I [...]

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Thinking about cricket ratings

For some reason, the ICC Test ‘Championship’ (read ‘Perpetual League Table’) is occupying my thoughts today. Having now disregarded a malicious desire to construct a (non-trivial) ranking system that maintains Australian superiority indefinitely, I instead offer the following cluster of thoughts:

Can it really be that the ICC points system fails to incorporate runs scored or [...]

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Vishy Anand: Still the Best

Concluding today was the unified World Chess Championship, with the Russian not winning. I’m delighted to see Anand victorious in what must be the most important match of a career noted for inventive play; his is a style I would particularly enjoy emulating, though it is doubtful that my play would not be more greatly [...]

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Batting 105: Don’t Think About It

My last post outlined the four attentional styles: broad external, narrow external, broad internal, narrow internal. I also stressed that each of us has a preferred style, which we will revert to when we have a choice or when under pressure.
Let me make a prediction – your preferred style is internal, either narrow or broad. [...]

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Batting 104: A Concentration Model

We learned in my last post that the batsman’s task is to concentrate on watching the ball right out of the bowler’s fingers, to pick up the length as soon as possible in order to make the forward vs. backward decision. But how do you direct and control your concentration?
Recall our definition of concentration: “What [...]

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Batting 103: Swing More Than The Bat

The question that naturally arises from my last post, Batting 102, is: why all this focus on where the ball will land? To answer that, we turn to the mechanics of batting.
There is more to hitting a cricket ball than simply swinging the bat with your arms. Your body’s largest muscles are in your legs [...]

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Batting 102: Visual Speedometer

We saw in my last post, Batting 101, that for the first stages of a cricket ball’s flight toward the batsman, the batsman isn’t following the ball with his eyes. He is keeping his eyes still, allowing the ball to cross his field of vision, before flicking them quickly to the point on the pitch [...]

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Batting 101: Don’t Watch The Ball

This is the first post in a series titled “Introduction to Batting in Cricket: Mechanics, Visual Strategy and Psychology”. I refer the reader to the outstanding book “Modern Psychology for Cricket and Other Australian Sports” by Robert Griffiths (1999). In this area, I am known as an “instant expert” – I read one book and [...]

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