Her Brittanic Majesty’s Broadcasting Commission purports to have Geoffrey Boycott lamenting that:
…England are being let down by both their batting and bowling.
Well that sounds like an easy fix; so much for the stiff upper lip. The United Kingdom does tend to go into unofficial national mourning when the colonies show the boys how it’s done, but today’s displays of collective self-pity are most unedifying, ma’am.
Meanwhile, sportal.com’s wholly-subjective n out of ten rating system plows on (but where are your error bars, lads?) – I wonder if the backlog of these missives is available, and if it would be a more accurate form guide than mere runs scored/wickets taken? The holistic yet imprecise nature of such ratings does seem to capture some additional information. If Letters to Nature had an archive going back to before it began, you’d be able to read about Brendon’s run function for Brian Lara and Steve Waugh, but an overall measure of playing strength as a function of time eludes us – and Wisden’s.
Yet such a number is just what Australia, nay, the cricket world needs – it would allow the player selection market to be governed by a real live market economy, though punters would also need a separate quantity that measured the player’s value to the team as a whole. If these two figures were known with sufficient precision, then cricketers could be inserted (and dumped) with greater rapidity than we observe today – for heaven’s sake, the game allows for tweaks to made every match. The current system of minimal roster-rolling is a hangover from when you’d take only 15 players on a tour to the homeland, fully expecting 6 of ’em to come down with scurvy on the nine-month boat trip over. I don’t buy this ‘maintaining a united spirit’ nonsense – we’re all playing for Team Australia. It’s just plain unmarket-like.
But really, it isn’t Australia that needs to listen. Duncan Fletcher should spot that he is devaluing Brand Giles by allowing the spinner to flaunt his meagre wares, but with the teams competing to see who can play more quicks at the WACA, we shall have to wait until Test the Fourth to see whether the forces of proctectionism have triumphed yet again.
Letters to Nature 
I’ve often wondered about such things. The ratings formerly known as the PriceWaterhouseCoopers cricket ratings attempted to rank cricketers based on current “form”. It uses a system where recent innings are given higher weight, as are runs scored against teams with higher ranked bowlers, and conversely, bowlers are rewarded more for taking the wicket of a higher ranked batsman.
Ultimately, though, the criterion for adjusting their parameters was simply “how well the resulting rankings match with consensus intuitive rankings”. Which is pretty useless, why not just cut out the middle man?
I would like to see a scientific rankings system – i.e. based on inductive reasoning. Based on all of the current data that we have, and some large class of probabilistic models, what are our predictions for the performance of each player in their next innings? Of course, this should be Bayesian but for a large model space we’d need to make approximations.
Would this give any insights into cricket? My hunch is that the concept of “form” will be proven to have little basis in fact, much like “hot streaks” in basketball, which have been famously debunked.
A timely post … I went on a tour of Lord’s today. It was very inspiring. In the bar behind Lord’s famous “Long Room”, a portrait of the Don stares calmly at a portrait of Douglas Jardine. Anyway, back to the post …
I think that the subjective element of team selection is very difficult to eradicate. It’s a much more difficult task than, say, ranking the world’s tennis players. Such a system need only consider past results of players. It is a ranking of a players recent performances. Team selection, however, must try to predict a players future scores.
One of the big unknowns is the psychological effect of recent failures on a player’s confidence. One player may see it as simply bad luck – he’s playing well but without luck and a big score is not far away. Another player may see it as being due to the opposition uncovering a fatal flaw in his technique e.g. Gilchrist’s supposed weakness against around the wicket fast bowling at the stumps. A ranking based only on past results is blind to this.
That said, any proposed measure has a wealth of data against which to test its predictions. I’d be very interested to see the results.