Hitting Against the Spin: How Cricket Really Works

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Some key takeaways were matchups, line and lengths for specific, bowlers and batsman it really showcases well how the stats help cricketers now optimise for success. Leamon has a rare kind of high intelligence: he is open to all kinds of knowledge, not just scientific knowledge, and he understands which method is appropriate in which circumstance. In this book, that skill was embellished with his primary job and that led to some insightful forays into the changing landscape of cricket, through the lens of data. You might be surprised to also know how big a role data is already playing in decision making in cricket.

Some of the graphs are pretty pointless whilst some of them are misleading (the graph on page 280 annoyed me).

Hitting Against the Spin' is an object lesson in how to use data and analytics to elucidate the science and structure. I can only assume this was an attempt at taking readers through ideas step-by-step, but it leads to pages and pages of unnecessary visuals that break up the flow of the writing. It was split into longer form cricket and T20, although the authors made a convincing case that they are very different in terms of approach and risk-taking. I find sports data intriguing, but I’m often limited in understanding by not being great with numbers and thanks to learning disabilities I find it very hard to read and understand tables. This is really well-written; despite moving from simple to complex quickly, the explanations are good enough that you rarely have to re-read anything.

Every book of this sort needs its quotable quirks, and this one had tethered cats and Chesterton's fences. It was co-written by a statistician on the England cricket team named Nathan Leamon, who'd previously written what I think is the best fictional work I've read about sport, 'The Test: A Novel', a book so good that even my cricket-loathing wife enjoyed it. Eoin Morgan’s foreword confirmed my expectations about the content, but also convinced me that I would like to read on, so the decision to invest was made. One way of viewing this book is as cricket's A Brief History of Time, a layman's guide to deep complexity, an act of communication as much as one of science.I could have done without the flowery Oppenhemier and Duality chapter and like Trent Boult I will extravagantly leave alone Leamon's cricket novel if I see it.

Things like how batting first shouldn’t be a fait accompli and until 2014 was actually a losing tactic (on average), how neutral umpires caused batting averages of the best batsmen to increase and helped left handers, why left handers have it easier against pace, right handers against spin. Also absorbing is an examination as to why there are a disproportionate number of left handed batsmen at Test level in some countries. Obviously there are some parallels to cricket and the statistical revolution really changed the game here so to see similar ideas be applied to my favorite game obviously interests me greatly. At a time when women’s cricket is becoming increasingly popular, I would urge the authors to make the pronouns in this book gender neutral, and also to draw insights from the women’s game as well as the men’s game.The editing is where this falls down, plenty of poorly-executed visuals with sub-standard labelling, or cases where two visuals could be combined for greater effect. I wouldn't recommend it if you didn't follow cricket or thought Geoffrey Boycott was a brilliant analyst but it started off well and kept my interest to the finish. I really wanted to like this book--to read about how one could use basic numeracy skills to get a deeper understanding of cricket, and explode some myths (or at least question some received wisdom) about the game. However post-Covid, there has been changes how the cricket is played, Joe Root is reverse scooping in a Test Cricket and BazBall has arrived. Also, since the story of sports and evolution is relatable across different kinds of sports (and non-sports fields too), non-cricket fans could end up enjoying this book.