Class is Permanent, Form is... an Illusion?

[Neil Pickup]

Have just posted this in the "Phil Mustard" thread, and I felt it deserved a thread of its own where non-Englishmen would read it. I'd be interested in other correlations/relationships/predictors that could be tested out.

There's been some quite interesting research in baseball (which Steven Jay Gould wrote about) suggesting that the concept of form - or at least of the "hot streak" - is actually illusory and that the fact that you scored runs in recent innings has no correlation to whether you'll score runs in your next one. However the human brain doesn't perceive it that way, and we easily fool ourselves into discerning a pattern - ie "form" - when in reality none exists.

Well this analysis is very straightforward to replicate in cricket.

A basic run of Pearson product-moment correlation coefficient - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, regressing runs scored in one innings against runs scored in the next, follows for Sachin Tendulkar - and completely backs up Gould's analysis. No correlation of any statistical substance, and if you increase the regression sample as I do in the second graph (correlating innings score versus average in the last ten innings, you actually get a negative relationship.

 

[Manee]

Very interesting indeed. I initially thought this would be a tongue-in-cheek affair but this is good stuff.

 

[Sanz]

I got a headache after reading that stuff. Sorry Mr. Pickup nothing against you but my brain just froze. I got to go to bed and reboot myself.

 

[zaremba]

Great work, Neil,
Now watch this topic get plagiarised by cricinfo.

 

[silentstriker]

Excellent stuff, and from my perspective, rather surprising. How about another player - maybe someone like Border vs. someone with more of a reputation of hit and miss.

 

[chasingthedon]

Excellent stuff, and from my perspective, rather surprising. How about another player - maybe someone like Border vs. someone with more of a reputation of hit and miss.

Atapattu.

 

[oitoitoi]

Great work, Neil,
Now watch this topic get plagiarised by cricinfo.

Lol their minions will be on it as I type.

 

[oitoitoi]

Personally I believe cricket (batting in particular) like other sports is about match ups. Certain players will excel in certain conditions against certain types of opposition players, this is not due to form IMO, it's to do with your technique and temperament. A good example is Yuvraj Singh, scores test runs in the subcontinent people say he's in great form, goes to australia and can't buy a run people say bad form, when really he just wasn't good enough. In my experience form is rarely confused with class, however a lack of form is often confused with being crap.

 

[Jarquis]

Tendulkar's highest test match score came off the back of his worst form?
Interesting

 

[Richard]

Atapattu.

Or Langer.

The thing about cricket is "being in form" and and "being in the runs" (or being in the good-figures for bowlers) aren't absolutely the same thing. It's impossible to argue that there aren't times when your timing is just in perfect order, and times when you're all over the place and can't middle a thing to save your life. And when your grip won't come right, and when no matter what you do you can't land the ball... etc. etc.

In cricket, form refers to this. Being in good form is far from a guarantee of scoring runs or taking good figures, it just increases the chances of it. Equally, being out-of-form is not a surefire sign that you're foredoomed to failure before you've even stepped on the park.

I actually think I've pretty much always said that a batsman's chance of scoring in one innings is completely irrelevant to his chance of scoring in the next - each innings is a new one, same way each time you flip a coin the chances of H or T are 50\50.

 

[Neil Pickup]

Marvan Atapattu

 

[Uppercut]

I read the same thing about football a while back- a striker is no more likely to score in a game if they scored in the last one. Certain players have a tendency to score in clumps but overall there isn't a correlation.

Form is a bit of an abstract concept anyway. I've seen KP come out to bat in the fourth innings against New Zealand and look beyond hopeless, like he'd never seen a bat before in his life. He ended up getting out lbw playing no stroke and i presumed him to be out of form but in the very next innings he hit a century. Some days you have it, some days you don't and they'll never be uniformly distributed so you get the concept of form.

 

[Furball]

Pickup, any chance of explaining in as simple terms as possible what we're looking at?

To my untrained eye, it's just a bunch of dots.

 

[Neil Pickup]

Pickup, any chance of explaining in as simple terms as possible what we're looking at?

To my untrained eye, it's just a bunch of dots.

I'm trying to find a relationship between a player's innings score and his records in previous innings. I expected there to be a pattern - probably pretty weak, but at least a pattern that indicated a player was slightly more likely to make a score if he was in 'form' (i.e. he'd scored heavily in his last innings [top graph] or last ten [bottom graph]).

Each dot represents an innings - the left hand axis shows that particular innings score, and the bottom axis shows either (a) his score in the previous innings or (b) the average of his previous ten innings. For example, take the extreme bottom right point on Marvan's first graph - it shows that the innings after he scored almost 250, he got next to nothing.

In effect, it is just a bunch of randomly distributed dots. I'm about to do it for my own career... and it looks pretty much the same, just on one eighth of the scale.

 

[Furball]

So if form was the concept it's assumed to be, there would more groupings towards the right of the graph?

 

[James_W]

So if form was the concept it's assumed to be, there would more groupings towards the right of the graph?

Towards the upper right and bottom left by my understanding, could be wrong.

 

[Furball]

Towards the upper right and bottom left by my understanding, could be wrong.

Yeah, should have qualified that by saying "good form."

 

[James_W]

I think the graph shows Atapattu (with that crazy little cluster in the bottom left) was in piss poor form for a good part of his career. Tbh.

 

[Jono]

Interesting results.

Surely form exists in tennis though?

 

[Neil Pickup]

I think the graph shows Atapattu (with that crazy little cluster in the bottom left) was in piss poor form for a good part of his career. Tbh.

Or that he wasn't good enough when first selected... or that there was a freak random distribution of low scores together...