Quote:
Originally Posted by zaremba
But the people who place faith in "psychological momentum" and suchlike are the players and the ex-players, who talk about it all the time as being highly significant. Are they imagining it? I find it hard to believe that they are. From my own much less vaunted experience of playing club cricket, I think that the mental state with which you enter a game is hugely important to how you perform, and your recent results play a big part in shaping that.
|
Although I've heard just as many ex-internationals say that once you're out on the pitch, none of the talk that's gone on before the game matters in the slightest. Actually I'm pretty sure I've heard Nasser Hussain use this exact phrase
and directly contradict it by talking about the effect of momentum. Which supports this:
Quote:
|
And finally... I recognise that all the above might be complete crap. Any cricket fan, and any cricket player, will tell you with complete certainty that "form" exists, and that it is a powerful force, but statistical research tends to show that it may be completely illusory. Research on baseball players' "hitting streaks" has shown that they basically don't exist, but rather are a creation of our innate tendency to see patterns where none exist. Likewise someone on CW did a quick analysis a year or so ago, taking Tendulkar as a random example, showing that his score in one innings was effectively useless as a predictor of how he would score in the next. And just as "form" might be an illusory concept, so might "momentum".
|
I find this quite easy to believe because it's almost exactly the type of mistake the human mind is particularly badly prone to- seeing patterns and significant causal effects in distributions that are almost completely random.