If a selection fails, is it wrong?

[GIMH]

If Richard chose to lurk, this thread would be too much for him and he'd be all over it

 

[Pothas]

Haha yeah, I thought of Richard as soon as I saw this thread.

 

[sledger]

Earlier today I selected 9 chicken McNuggets instead of 12. I would have no qualms about branding this selection as "wrong".

Edit: The fact that I selected McDonalds over the other fast food dispensaries in the area could also be said to be a "wrong" selection. It was an all round unsatisfactory turn of events.

 

[indiaholic]

I feel that a selection strategy that fails more often than not but is nimble enough to weed out the failures and every now and then selects players good enough to play for 10 years+ is a good strategy. Even if the ratio of hits to misses is rather low, if the hits are huge then IMO it is a strategy that works.

 

[Manee]

Haha yeah, I thought of Richard as soon as I saw this thread.

I hope I'm less dogmatic, but after a discussion with my brother on the subject, I'm not so sure. Anyway, I hope they do allow me to write the piece for them, I think that'd be pretty useful and there are a lot of different opinions expressed so far. Interestingly, everyone seems to think that what they are saying is the common-sense, obvious view and yet there is a fair bit of divergence between people.

 

[Manee]

I feel that a selection strategy that fails more often than not but is nimble enough to weed out the failures and every now and then selects players good enough to play for 10 years+ is a good strategy. Even if the ratio of hits to misses is rather low, if the hits are huge then IMO it is a strategy that works.

Posts like this are awesome because it is something I'd totally overlooked.

 

[indiaholic]

 

[Valer]

What range does everyone think is appropriate when it comes to selection? For example, a lot of people don't rate Anderson despite him being gun for the last few years because his overall average is high. As a result he wouldn't make a few people's team. So what range of stats should be considered; 2-3 years, 3-4 years, 5 years, etc?

Tbf he's averaged 29.00 since the end of the 2010/2011 ashes -- this is more worrying than his start tbh.


In general
Consistency policy is the king, there is a lot more hard work and experience involved in being the best than just pure talent.

 

[Manee]

In general
Consistency policy is the king, there is a lot more hard work and experience involved in being the best than just pure talent.

Do would go as far to say that a consistent domestic player who is picked but fails places no fault on the selectors? Suppose there are possible problems with his technique (ooh, he doesn't get very far forward, etc) but nothing obvious like he's scared of pace, cannot play mystery spin, etc. Sorry if I'm just asking questions but if they give me an opportunity to write this article (which is very unlikely), I would like to have everything considered.

 

[Valer]

Do would go as far to say that a consistent domestic player who is picked but fails places no fault on the selectors? Suppose there are possible problems with his technique (ooh, he doesn't get very far forward, etc) but nothing obvious like he's scared of pace, cannot play mystery spin, etc. Sorry if I'm just asking questions but if they give me an opportunity to write this article (which is very unlikely), I would like to have everything considered.

You're going to get players who don't kick on. I don't see that as a problem.

If there is something actually problematic (but minor) ask him to work on the problem in domestic then if you still want a player of that type give him another chance.

I'm less of a fan of the continual in/ out of the team that is happening with say the australian batting line-up back them on the 2nd chance for a good stint and if that fails think about the blacklist.

WRT questions its much easier to write this stuff when your answering question I think.

 

[Jono]

This reminds me of Richard but in the reverse - arguing a selection that succeeds can still be the wrong selection.

 

[JontyPanesar]

Good thread.

The answer is obviously no for a few reasons, but I think the best reason is about knowing the counterfactual. If player X wasn't selected, who would have been selected in player X's place, how long of a run would he have been given, and what would be the likelihood of his success?

 

[JontyPanesar]

I think a secondary reason why the answer is no is because of process. Bypassing the process to seek out a better selection sets a bad precedent. It can devalue domestic first-class competitions and place too much emphasis on doing well in limited overs competitions (u19, t20, list-a, odis). Picking someone like Rogers, even if it doesn't really come off and he is soon dropped at the end of the Ashes, will encourage the veterans of Shield to keep working hard on their game in hope of a selection. This would help reverse some of the terrible precedent in ignoring Katich, Hodge, Dussey, Jaques, etc despite all of the first-class runs they made while Aus was light on batsmen.

tl;dr: Sometimes a selection that fails still reinforces an otherwise sound process.

 

[adub]

This is the crux of the debate I'm trying to encourage. Perhaps hindsight is irrelevant. Perhaps outcomes are products of chance and the correct selection is not the one that works but the one with the largest chance of working.

That is my view of selections. It should be very very rare that selectors go with the gut (as in no where near as often as they have with Australian spinners since Warne for instance). The game is smarter than the selectors will ever be and so the best performers over a significant period at the level below should be the first picked to step up in almost every instance. The safe pick on results might fail, or the gut pick might succeed, but the inverse is far more likely to be the result over the longer term.

Too often selectors point to rare occasions where a left field pick (say Warne's initial selection) work out and never balance that against all of times picking a player without a real record of success has failed miserably (hello Xavier Doherty, Steve Smith (as a front line spinner), Cam White (as a front line spinner), Michael Beer, and Ashton Agar amongst other). Even Warne's selection can be argued as being premature. He was so good he would have had the numbers to justify his selection soon enough but would have escaped going for 1/200 on debut. The game sorts the wheat from the chaff. Selectors delude themselves when they think they have some special insight to see why a player with a strong record won't make the step up, but another player with limited success will suddenly become a champion if given a chance and then cherry pick a small number of successes from a much larger number of abject failures for this sort of selection.

 

[JontyPanesar]

That is my view of selections. It should be very very rare that selectors go with the gut (as in no where near as often as they have with Australian spinners since Warne for instance). The game is smarter than the selectors will ever be and so the best performers over a significant period at the level below should be the first picked to step up in almost every instance. The safe pick on results might fail, or the gut pick might succeed, but the inverse is far more likely to be the result over the longer term.

Too often selectors point to rare occasions where a left field pick (say Warne's initial selection) work out and never balance that against all of times picking a player without a real record of success has failed miserably (hello Xavier Doherty, Steve Smith (as a front line spinner), Cam White (as a front line spinner), Michael Beer, and Ashton Agar amongst other). Even Warne's selection can be argued as being premature. He was so good he would have had the numbers to justify his selection soon enough but would have escaped going for 1/200 on debut. The game sorts the wheat from the chaff. Selectors delude themselves when they think they have some special insight to see why a player with a strong record won't make the step up, but another player with limited success will suddenly become a champion if given a chance and then cherry pick a small number of successes from a much larger number of abject failures for this sort of selection.

Great post. Like you and manee, I'd also encourage more probabilistic thinking about past selections. Everything seems deterministic in retrospect but it's not.

I'd only add a couple of caveats. Selectors should have insight into basic issues a batsman or bowler might have trouble with that might not be exposed at the domestic level. Indian batsmen might do well in Ranji but struggle vs raw pace on faster pitches, the short ball, or tempering ones driving on the up. I'm not sure a master of Shield cricket is guaranteed to do well on turning pitches. So some analysis of technique is required by selectors. But even if there are technical weaknesses, performance should ultimately never be denied. Maybe give some A tours first, but domestic FC is the best lab for judging the quality of potential test players

 

[social]

Having watched Bailey's debut, I am no more convinced today that he has a future as a test batsman than I was before the test

However, given that the selectors consistently cited the things that he brings to the table aside from his batting as justification for his selection AND that the team won, how is it possible to say that his selection was an incorrect decision despite the low(ish) scores and unconvincing performance?

 

[Dan]

Were England wrong to pick Graeme Hick or Mark Ramprakash when they did, on the back of 50+ FC averages, even though they ended up averaging 30? Who was a better selection at the time?
Was Australia right to pick Jason Krejza, with an FC average of 50+ and getting pumped in a warm-up match, even though he took 12 for the match on debut? Who was a better selection at the time?

I think results have some influence over a selection being good or bad, but in the long term there are so many variables that aren't related to selection that can affect results. Plus it depends on whether we measure it over the short- or long-term - selectors willing to forego the potential of immediate results that they suspect would be offered by an alternative player in the hope the selected goes on to have a 10k run Test career (a possible example might be Clarke vs. Lehmann after the '04 India tour), or vice-versa.

 

[GIMH]

This reminds me of Richard but in the reverse - arguing a selection that succeeds can still be the wrong selection.

Yeah great that Jono, thanks for bringing it to our attention

 

[harsh.ag]

I guess I am slightly rigid that way. Even if a selection works, but I had clear reasons to believe somebody else would have been a better selection, I wouldn't give credit to the selectors. I would, of course, give the player his due praise. For example, if Jadeja is picked in SA and works, I would still be pissed with the selectors. Weird I guess. One of the reasons why selectors sticking to Dhoni's **** talismanic cricketers (esp in WC 2011) has been infuriating.

I also think that good domestic players should get a look into the side on a rotation basis. I think it is a great shame that players such as Amol Muzumdar, Amit Mishra, S Badrinath haven't had at least a few tests under their belt, not to mention the likes of Rajinder Goel and Padmakar Shivalkar.

 

[Ryan19]

Even over the long-term? Someone selected with seemingly little due cause goes on to have an all-time great career was still a wrong selection?

It depends. For New Zealand someone like Tim Southee was given a lot of chances when he really failed to take them. I thought there was definitely better bowlers in New Zealand at that time. However, now he has come good. The question is would he bowling as well now had he played a few seasons of Plunket Shield to develop his bowling? Maybe Southee needed a couple of years of average bowling at test level to become the player he is today? If that is the case then it was a good selection. However, if it was the case that Southee could have developed just as well outside of test cricket then the initial decision to select him was poor and we sacrificed short term performance for nothing.

The question of whether a selection is good or not cannot be answered fully because we don't have a controlled environment. We can't just turn the clock back and see what would have happened if we picked someone else.