FCA goes mainstream

[fredfertang]

Be afraid, be very afraid

 

[Shri]

They spelled Richard C-H-A-R-L-E-S.

 

[harsh.ag]

 

[grecian]

With being a pedant, it's not really suggesting a FCA, it's an interesting analysis actually, and of course it clearly states it's pretty much impossible to start doing a proper analysis before about 2005, so impossible to compare to players from the past. One of Richard's more ridiculous tenets was that catching had got worse, hence the nought players getting more let-offs, which obviously completely was a rose-colored opinion,in the end the article suggests the opposite . One thing he did get right was Sehwag getting dropped more than most, but as mentioned in the article there is a reason for that big heavier bats with a hard hitting batsman,rather than a statistical outlier of him being "luckier" than other batsmen throughout his career.

 

[GIMH]

Richard was particularly dismissive that how hard the ball was hit could impact the likelihood of it being caught

 

[Howe_zat]

Yeah as often mentioned the big issue with Richardisms was usually his total lack of applying the idea in any factual way, rather than just made up reasons to bag players he didn't like. Chances are worth looking at if you find a way of tracking them properly and this bloke is at least trying to do.

 

[Top_Cat]

Decent. If nothing else, the article was a reasonable tutorial on confounds.

 

[straw man]

Good article.

Nice little stat that Robbie Hart still holds the record (since 2000) for most costly drop, after dropping Inzamam on 32 on the way to his score of 329.

 

[AndrewB]

What's FCA?

 

[morgieb]

What's FCA?

First chance average. Basically if someone got dropped during their innings none of the runs they scored after that point counted.

 

[morgieb]

With being a pedant, it's not really suggesting a FCA, it's an interesting analysis actually, and of course it clearly states it's pretty much impossible to start doing a proper analysis before about 2005, so impossible to compare to players from the past. One of Richard's more ridiculous tenets was that catching had got worse, hence the nought players getting more let-offs, which obviously completely was a rose-colored opinion,in the end the article suggests the opposite . One thing he did get right was Sehwag getting dropped more than most, but as mentioned in the article there is a reason for that big heavier bats with a hard hitting batsman,rather than a statistical outlier of him being "luckier" than other batsmen throughout his career.

Yeah as others have said, the problem with FCA is that it was basically a theory designed to discredit Marcus Trescothick.

 

[Prince EWS]

Yeah as others have said, the problem with FCA is that it was basically a theory designed to discredit Marcus Trescothick.

Yeah I didn't actually mind the thoery per se; what annoyed me was that he never actually calculated it for anyone except Trescothick. He compared Trescothick's FCA to the scorecard averages of everyone else which was obviously entirely unfair, and then just brought it up periodically whenever conventional statistics didn't back up a point he was making. It was just a hidey-hole for him to duck into whenever he seemed like he was contradicting himself.

Richard was one of my favourite posters and I wish he'd come back but FCA was only used when it was convenient for him to justify his biases; that's why it wasn't taken seriously, not so much the actual theory behind it.

 

[cnerd123]

This is actually a fascinating article.

Cricket needs more stats like this

 

[Flem274*]

Richard was one of my favourite posters

you're drunk

 

[Zinzan]

Superb analysis that. Surprised to see the lowest % of drops has been at square leg. I would have thought it was either mid-off or mid-on.

 

[fredfertang]

Yeah I didn't actually mind the thoery per se; what annoyed me was that he never actually calculated it for anyone except Trescothick. He compared Trescothick's FCA to the scorecard averages of everyone else which was obviously entirely unfair, and then just brought it up periodically whenever conventional statistics didn't back up a point he was making. It was just a hidey-hole for him to duck into whenever he seemed like he was contradicting himself.

Richard was one of my favourite posters and I wish he'd come back but FCA was only used when it was convenient for him to justify his biases; that's why it wasn't taken seriously, not so much the actual theory behind it.

Agreed - it is an interesting idea badly used by Richard. One of the problems with it, if you wanted to do it in absolute terms, would be the impossibility of factoring in (pre DRS) lbws that aren't given thus a Virender Sehwag would suffer in comparison with a Geoffrey Boycott

Where I'd like to see what effect it had would be one of the avenues Davis could go down, that being to calculate the FCA for a whole innings and compare that with the FCA for the same innings - self-evidently if for Team A you get say ten dropped catches all off batters who don't go on much further, whereas Team A's catching is almost faultless, other than dropping the double centurion before he'd scored. That said I can't see it telling us anything we don't already know

Some cracking trivia in there though - particularly liked the KP one - really quite remarkable

 

[morgieb]

One thing that might be interesting to track is correct/incorrect dismissals given by umpires pre-DRS.

 

[Shri]

One thing that might be interesting to track is correct/incorrect dismissals given by umpires pre-DRS.

We tried that once in Sydney '08 and the aussies waah'd.

 

[GIMH]

The other weakness of the theory as Richard used to present it is there was no value to any runs after a drop/false lbw etc. So a batsman dropped on 0 who scored 3 would generate the same FCA points as one dropped on 0 going on to score 391.

I think it was SJS who suggested if you're going to go down the FCA route then as a minimum you should be dividing total runs by wickets + drops etc rather than discounting everything after a drop.

 

[Tom Halsey]

The other weakness of the theory as Richard used to present it is there was no value to any runs after a drop/false lbw etc. So a batsman dropped on 0 who scored 3 would generate the same FCA points as one dropped on 0 going on to score 391.

I think it was SJS who suggested if you're going to go down the FCA route then as a minimum you should be dividing total runs by wickets + drops etc rather than discounting everything after a drop.

I remember Richard talking about some sort of All Chance Average tbf, which I agree is a significant improvement on the FCA.

As PEWS and Howe said, IMO the theory itself isn't terrible, it was the completely haphazard application of the theory that grated.