England cricket machine stalls amid talk of damned goodbyes and statistics

http://www.theguardian.com/sport/blog/2015/mar/11/england-cricket-world-cup-peter-moores

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A few years ago, a delivery driver from Doncaster almost drove his car off a cliff. His BMW was left teetering on the edge of a 100ft precipice in Yorkshire after he had followed his satnav’s instructions, despite increasing indications that he had ceded a shade too much control to the gadget. “It just kept insisting the path was a road, even as it was getting narrower and steeper,” the chap explained, “so I just trusted it. I rely on my satnav. I couldn’t do without it for my job.”

Alas, his claim that he was only following orders proved an insufficient defence against the careless driving charge he subsequently incurred. And so with Peter Moores, whose suggestion that he’d need to “look at the data” in the wake of England’s World Cup exit at the hands of Bangladesh has failed to cut his detractors off at the pass. Indeed, it has spawned a derision-fest the England coach might have modelled even without the aid of technology. Was 275 chaseable? Computer says no.

This is now a state-of-the-art cock-up, so let’s not rule out any theories at this stage. My own suspicion is that the software has become sentient and is now actively working to sabotage the England one-day cricket side. It’s a small start, admittedly – but give it time and it’ll become Skynet.

That antagonistic intelligence in the Terminator series had its origins in a system designed to eliminate human error and there is something of that ethos in all stats-based sports management systems essentially inspired by Moneyball, where gut-based scouting decisions – such as whether or not someone “looked like a ballplayer” – were dispensed with in favour of a ruthless application of statistics and on-base percentages and whatnot. People love this sort of thing when it’s going well, it must be said – just as they love their satnavs when the surrender of navigational responsibility gets them where they want to go. Less so when their 5 Series is being pulled back from the brink by search and rescue.

Yet the rise of the machines accelerates. A recent London Review of Books article, headlined The Robots Are Coming, cited a 2013 paper by two Oxford Academics that had attempted to calculate how susceptible various jobs were to computerisation, and ended up ranking 702 of them. The top five “safest” were recreational therapists, first-line supervisors of mechanics, installers and repairers, emergency management directors, mental health and substance abuse social workers, and audiologists. The five most precarious were insurance underwriters, mathematical technicians, sewer workers, title examiners, abstractors and searchers, and, at 702, telemarketers. Tantalisingly, the position of England cricket coach was not assessed.

As things stand, it is a matter of debate how much reliance is truly placed on statistics and data within the England cricket set-up. Moores insists: “We don’t do analysis as it’s talked about in the press, it’s not the way we do it.” And Mike Atherton – an intelligence to which I would gladly cede control of all my major decisions – regards blaming the defeat on an obsession with statistics as just one of the “lazy theories” doing the rounds.

Even so, Moores’ unfortunate comment at this telling moment of weakness cast him as the junior partner in his relationship with the machines. Most England fans would probably prefer it if he’d downplay the technology – or at the very least, that he would claim to enjoy the sort of sparring, buddy-type relationship with it that Michael Knight did with KITT. Even as youngsters, we all realised that sometimes you had to override the robotic voice of caution and hit Turbo Boost. Without wishing to pre-empt the painstakingly dispassionate conclusions of the England and Wales Cricket Board’s supercomputer, instinct suggests you cannot win a World Cup on Auto Cruise.

Anyway, Moores is not resigning, for now, although that was never really going to happen – no one in public life resigns any more. In fact, I’m just ripping off a print-out from my own journobot, which insists that the last five people to have resigned are David Beckham, Greg Dyke, Estelle Morris, Keggy Keegan and Lord Carrington. I’ll have to look at that data later. Instead, we’re in that familiar phase where everyone is “taking responsibility”.

Taking responsibility has become an auto-antonym – one of those things that also means something like its opposite. “To cleave” can mean “to sunder” or “to cling together”, for instance, while “to trim” could indicate either the adding of an edge or its removal. The arch practitioner of taking full responsibility is Tony Blair, who takes the living shit out of responsibility at any opportunity, while never really having taken responsibility for anything at all – ever. If one person can be said to have dealt the fatal blow to the phrase in its original meaning, it is our former prime minister, who claims to have taken responsibility for a series of calamitous foreign policy adventures, even as he finds insanely lucrative new ways of cashing in on their fallout by the day.

As far as calamitous cricketing adventures go, even the most malevolent machines couldn’t model a scenario in which the opening day of the 2019 World Cup results in England going out to Iraq on home soil. But given they play Afghanistan on Friday, it doesn’t take a computer to work out how quickly that match could collapse into metaphor on current form.