Saturday 18 July 2015

Column 23, 2015 – Useless tosser

Printed in The Cricket Paper, issue 126, Friday July 17, 2015.
[Full text below]



An old friend of mine, who’s also a psychologist, a statistician and a game-theory geek, almost convinced me once that there is no such thing as luck.

Chance, Tom says, yes of course. But one’s propensity to succeed in matters of chance is merely an illusion of our own devising. “A quantifiable parameter of a statistical distribution”, luck is a convenient way to talk about how chance is apportioned, nothing more.

That makes sense. Though it’s hard to buy it completely.

What is lucky? Lucky socks or similar are clearly a ludicrous construct, worthy of the snorts of derision usually reserved for astrology. But it remains hard to resist the notion that there’s some element of luck in the toss of a coin. And the toss is the only aspect in all forms of cricket that is entirely down to chance.

Napoleon famously said that he’d rather have lucky generals than good ones. Our captain Henry is a fine all round cricketer, but frankly a useless tosser. If you see what I mean.

Of the ten Saturday tosses this season, he’s lost eight. That’s actually quite unlikely in itself. Each in isolation is a 50/50 chance, and of course the coin cares nothing for history. But if you take them as a sequence of 50% chances, it’s tempting to see the likelihood of repeating the result halving each time. So in a five Test series like the Ashes for example, if Cook won the first four, he’d have a 96.875% probability of losing the last one. (At the Oval. Now, is that wise?)

Total nonsense, of course. If you toss a coin 10,000 times, you’ll get roughly 5,000 heads and 5,000 tails. Five is too small a sample to be statistically relevant. And each time it happens it’s still a 50/50 chance.

A more important question might be: do you want to win the toss?

There’s always much discussion about it on Saturdays, but the truth is, in good weather, it comes down to whether you as a team prefer setting or chasing a target. Test cricket is different. Ask Nasser Hussain about Brisbane 2002, or Ricky Ponting about Edgbaston 2005 – Michael Vaughan has gone so far as to say that Ponting’s decision to bowl first that game cost him the Ashes.

Statistically this year, we are more likely to win when we bat first (five out of seven) but only when we’re put in. Of H’s two successful tosses, he batted once and bowled once. We lost both.

Which has led him to pose an interesting question: if you win the toss, can you still defer the decision to your opponent?

The laws don’t help answer this question. Law 12.4 states: “The captains shall toss for the choice of innings…” but it doesn’t say that the winner must decide. So how about: “My decision is: you decide”?

Or he could just keep doing what he’s doing. Stay lucky mate: lose the toss.



- ends 493 words -


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