Is there a statistical way to determine a good captain?

[wpdavid]

When he captained against a full strength Aussie side in 79/80 he was whitewashed.

Yup.

 

[Athlai]

There probably is a way to statically model the best bowling plans and fielding positions in the modern era. But these aren't strictly the "captain" anyway.

 

[Xix2565]

Impossible unless you have incredibly loose standards and limited understanding of modern day strategizing.

 

[Son Of Coco]

First Toss Average

 

[ankitj]

In theory you could quantify how often a team should've won going into a test and compare this expected win percentage to actual wins but there's 3 problems with this:
It's based on the premise that a good captain necessarily makes his team perform better than they should.
Expected win percentage would be pretty dicey to calculate.
Choking, loss of form, specific match ups etc and generally just say too many confounding factors.

TLDR: No

 

[Bolo.]

Many posters like to resort to using the old win/loss ratios to determine a captain's standing. I consider such a measure to be so contextual to the team's ability and opposition and where they play that it doesn't tell us much about captaincy quality.

Instead, I prefer looking at the most basic measure of whether the team's performance improves to determine a good captain. One way is to look at how the team progresses up in their global ranking during the captain's tenure.

The ranking can be divided into the following tiers:
No.1 - top ranking
Top tier - ranking between 1-3
Middle tier - ranking between 4-6
Bottom tier - worst of the worst

The basic criteria then for a good captain then is based on moving up to a tier above. Most captains with some sort of reputation have seen the team move up in the rankings in their time.

Graeme Smith, Kohli, Williamson took their teams from middle tier to No.1.

Imran Khan, Misbah, Vaughn took their teams from middle tier to top tier.

Ranatunga and Nasser Hussain took their teams from bottom tier to middle tier.

The case of Australian captains is interesting. Border took his team from top tier to bottom tier before steadily taking them to top tier again. Taylor took them from top tier to no.1, and Waugh kept them as no.1. Ponting took them from no.1 down to middle tier by the time he gave up the captaincy after losing the Ashes in 2010, which is one of the reasons I don't fancy Ponting as captain as highly as he couldnt sustain them in top tier even after the big reitrements.

Of course, tier progression is just one among several factors to determine captain quality. Beyond that, you need to look at other factors such as inspiration, tactics, etc. to know exactly how good they are.

I will never understand the Smith love. Pretty much everyone on this site rewrites his captaincy history cos it finished strong.

RSA had lost 8 tests in the 16 series prior to Smith taking over. 5 of the losses were against the arguably GOAT AUS. They were not a mid tier team when Smith took over.

They became a mid tier team under Smith. Dropped down to 6th (maybe even 7th) on ICC rankings IIRC. Team was real shitty under him in the early years (mostly not his fault TBF... talent pool was dry for a while, but he was a crap captain early days... was strategically terrible, pushed for some real poor selections, and there were some really questionable issues about team culture).

By your definition, Smith was good cos he took got a number 2 team and left a number 1. But the captain before him had nearly twice the W/L that he did, and as good as RSA were at the end of Smiths time, they only got to number 1 because Aus had weakened.

 

[Bolo.]

And ya, trying to statistically rate a captain will never work.

 

[subshakerz]

I will never understand the Smith love. Pretty much everyone on this site rewrites his captaincy history cos it finished strong.

RSA had lost 8 tests in the 16 series prior to Smith taking over. 5 of the losses were against the arguably GOAT AUS. They were not a mid tier team when Smith took over.

They became a mid tier team under Smith. Dropped down to 6th (maybe even 7th) on ICC rankings IIRC. Team was real ****ty under him in the early years (mostly not his fault TBF... talent pool was dry for a while, but he was a crap captain early days... was strategically terrible, pushed for some real poor selections, and there were some really questionable issues about team culture).

By your definition, Smith was good cos he took got a number 2 team and left a number 1. But the captain before him had nearly twice the W/L that he did, and as good as RSA were at the end of Smiths time, they only got to number 1 because Aus had weakened.

I mention that Smith took his team from mid tier to no.1. Okay, so he dropped a bit in the beginning which I forgot to mention.

In that way he was similar to Border, the team dropped in the beginning before rising to the top.