Call Steve Waugh's bluff

The Aussies are on a roll, and the stakes for them are high. Steve Waugh recently stated that the record breaking 15 wins in a row would (almost) be for naught if they don't win in India.

The Waugh of words started when Steve mischievously suggested that the Indian side was preparing to face the Aussies by preparing the dull tracks of yesteryears. Remember those cricket killing fields of the India-Pakistan 1960 series, or the India-England 1980 series, or the India-Pakistan series of 1987 (before the final Test)? Remember also, how Test cricket was reborn in Bangalore when India narrowly lost a match on a grossly underprepared pitch? But the crowds came in droves, to watch a cricket contest, and not batting for the record books. And Gavaskar scored 96, a score which I judge to be an adjusted score of 179 runs.

So if Mr. Waugh has raised the dead pitch bogie, he may be arguing a just cause. But according to me, Steve is trying to be clever - perhaps too clever by half, which will be the case if his bluff is called. It is no secret that Australia would like to extend their unbroken record, and beat India in India. And their chances of doing so are higher on a dead track than on an underprepared pitch! In other words, if the Indian cricketing authorities confirm Steve's ostensible nightmare, they will be fulfilling his dream.

The CricketX team has developed models of both Test cricket and oneday cricket. Complete records of Test match data (since the first Test at Melbourne in 1877) and one-day cricket (since the first match, also at Melbourne, in January 1971) are incorporated into an integrated model of cricket. This model has an important UHH (Untouched by Human Hands) property i.e. the model generates all the results that are necessary for a cricket fan. For example, what are the odds of a team winning a match, or a series? Who is likely to score the most runs, take the most wickets? Which player is the best, both on a career and form basis.

The model incorporates various "known" factors that affect a player, and team's, performance - own ability, opposition strength (compartmentalized as bowling and batting strength), home team advantage, nature of pitch, "tension" conditions in a match etc. None of these parameters are subjective - they are generated from within the crimetric (cricket econometrics) model. The inner workings of this model have been discussed at various forums - London School of Economics, Princeton University, Delhi School of Economics, Indian Statistical Institute to name a few. This model formed the basis of my book on Test cricket (Between the Wickets: The Who and Why of the Best in Cricket) published in 1987, a book described by John Arlott as "a salutary and illuminating book which will humble all of us who love and dispute about the game. Let us check our prejudices by these computerized judgements".

Arlott was right - the model judgements have to be at least approximately right. Indeed, that is the bedrock of the philosophy behind my work - it ain't good unless it forecasts well - and it cannot forecast well unless it meets the simple smell test of common sense and intuition.

The key forecast of interest to most fans is who will win the forthcoming India-Australia series. And why. If the India-Australia series were to be played in a third country on neutral grounds with zero home-team advantage then India would have a 50 percent chance of losing, 14 percent chance of winning and a 36 percent chance of a draw. (These are forecasts for the first match of the series; after every match, the model is updated on the basis of data from the new match, and new forecasts made). But this series is being played in India, on Indian pitches and other natural "home-team" advantages that Indians have e.g. familiarity with the grounds, heat conditions, food, lack of homesickness etc.

The model has separate indices for batting and bowling; in batting, India is about 35 percent behind the Aussies, and in bowling, Australia is about 19 percent ahead. But my analysis of past trends show bowling is more important than batting (has a higher weight) in explaining performance in Tests (the opposite is true in one-day cricket). So India starts off at a considerable disadvantage.

The batting and bowling indices of the two teams are used to generate the above probabilities e.g. India's probability of losing a match is 50 percent. The model uses these indices to generate a three-way forecast - the probability of a team winning, losing and drawing a particular match. Thus, it is not 50 percent of winning since the probability of a draw (36 percent) is also present! The most "difficult" prediction, in terms of accuracy, are drawn matches. This is expected since apart from the pitch, rained out days are important factors affecting a draw - and the probability of rain is not part of our model, yet! If drawn matches are excluded, then the correct forecasts for matches involving Australia are close to 67 percent, and those involving India, 73 percent. For Zimbabwe, the correct prediction record is a high 82 percent.

The probabilities of an Indian loss get reduced to 44 percent with the knowledge that the pitch will be neutral (neither favouring bowlers or batsmen). The model generates a pitch index which has varied from 0.40 (in the 1964 England-Australia Test at Manchester when Australia scored 656 and England replied with 611) to 4.4 (Australia 112 all out) vs. England (61 all out) in January 1902. Incidentally, the pitch index for the India-Pakistan match in Bangalore in 1987 was 1.9. The distribution of the pitch index over all the matches played is as follows.

Pattern of pitches in Test cricket - 1877 - 2001

Pitch Index range according to our model     No. of Tests      % of Matches
Less than 0.75                                278                 18.2
0.75 to 0.9                                   320                 20.9
0.90 to 1.1                                   431                 28.2
1.1 to 1.4                                    314                 20.6
Greater than 1.4                              185                 12.1
Average Index = 1.04
Total                                        1529                 100

Getting back to the basics. On a neutral pitch (pitch index between 0.90 and 1.1), and playing in India, the probability of an Indian loss is 44 percent. But if the pitch favours batsmen (pitch index between 0.75 and 0.9) then the chances of an Indian loss get reduced to 41 percent. This would seem that Steve Waugh is right in not wanting a dead pitch. But note the steep decline in probability of an Indian loss - from 44 to 35 percent - if India prepares pitches that favour spin bowlers - and this is what Mr. Waugh is really not wanting, rather than his feigned protestations about a dead pitch. I think Mr. Waugh does protest too much.

Pitching for the Winning Pitch

Probability of(in %) Nature of Pitch Indian Loss Draw Indian Win Flat Dead Pitch - Index 0.75 - 0.90 41 40 19 Sporting Neutral Pitch - Index 0.90 to 1.1 44 39 17 Turning (underprepared) pitch - Index 1.1 to 1.4 35 42 23

One way to assess the accuracy of the model is to compare it with market forecasts. As reported in the Indian press, legal betting odds in Australia (provided by CentreBet) before the first Test were as follows: a drawn series 2/1, an Australian win 4/5 and an Indian win 9/2. These odds are market odds and hence have immense credibility - ours are based on a model which uses Test match data since 1877! Using an average set of probabilities reported above, the odds we come up with for a drawn series are 3/2, for an Australian win 3/2 and for an Indian win, 4/1. The market odds and the odds arrived from our model are not that far apart, which is reassuring.

There is an additional dimension - the psychology of an Aussie loss. Think about it - here is a team that has won 15 matches in a row, against a team that has won only 4 of their last fifteen matches - actually only 2 since victories over Zimbabwe and Bangladesh are not that meaningful. What if the Australian team loses to India! The humiliation and the psychological setback for Australia would be large, and well worth the effort. If on a spinning track, India loses, well, that was predictable, and India can go on and hope to win the next match.

Now think of a dead pitch. The probability of Australia losing on an Indian dead pitch is 19 percent (in Australia, on a dead pitch, the probability of an Australian loss is only 10 percent). Not insignificant, but small. But think of the humiliation India would receive if it lost to Australia on a dead track. And since on such wickets, the margins of victory are high, the ignominy of a loss should not be underestimated.

Bottom line: By preparing a flat track, the Indian cricket administrators would be falling into a carefully laid out Aussie trap. The last thing Indians should do is to prepare dead tracks. Also, "neutral" wickets should not be prepared. The best way to neutralize a heavy disadvantage in batting and bowling is to underprepare the wicket - not too much to make the result random (India-Pakistan, 1987) but enough to make the Australians run for the money - and give India a two-thirds chance of not losing, and a one in four chance of actually winning.