He held degrees in both English and Economics, and the ability to to articulate the world of one, with the words of the other.

There were some great profundities, many of which you’d think people should already know, but don’t, and which captains, coaches, selectors and players should be using to their advantage, but aren’t. At a time when women’s cricket is becoming increasingly popular, I would urge the authors to make the pronouns in this book gender neutral, and also to draw insights from the women’s game as well as the men’s game. In an era of big-data, how are leaders in sport, business, politics and education supposed to use the power of this new tool productively? The only cricket book they had that I didn’t already own was this one, so that meant it was the one I picked up.Only fifteen years ago it would have been difficult to answer them – cricket was guided only by decades-old tradition and received wisdom. Some of the findings are in line with conventional cricketing wisdom but add a lot of value with granular breakup of data. For a book that claims to be heavy on statistical analysis, it doesn’t give anything like enough weight to probability or take enough account of the counterfactual. I'm a mild cricket fan, which is probably the minimum entry level for access to the book, but anyone who reaches that level will love the book, and for real cricket fans it qualifies as a must-read.

One other super interesting insight was the IPL auction and the simulations people would go through to make that work. I wouldn't recommend it if you didn't follow cricket or thought Geoffrey Boycott was a brilliant analyst but it started off well and kept my interest to the finish. Also, since the story of sports and evolution is relatable across different kinds of sports (and non-sports fields too), non-cricket fans could end up enjoying this book. There are charts and graphs and, as others have mentioned, some of these don't really enlighten me very much but one needs them in a book of this type. For example, the chapter on left handed batsmen is brilliant but near the end, the analysis about spinners is rushed and the exclusion of leg spinners is handwavy which is funny because later leg spin gets its own chapter.As someone who is a great fan of cricket and has a large knowledge of cricket it was rare to find a book that challenged my perceptions of how the game operated. The book covers a wide spectrum, from aspects which would be of interest to people with no knowledge of cricket whatsoever - the section on poker and risk-theory would fascinate anyone - to aspects which were even too nerdy for me as a moderate cricket fan (though had I sat down and studied them in just a little more detail then I would probably have found them just as interesting as the rest of the book). My ‘favourite’ so far is a chart where the x axis is labelled “Span”, and goes “2,002”, “2,004”… up to “2,018”. I was intrigued by this book as it covered aspects of cricket that I hadn’t considered before and revealed stats that you wouldn’t expect.

It raises one particular issue I'd never previously considered but which is obvious once pointed out. Test cricket is effectively a series of individual battles, the accumulated results of which decide the outcome of the game.As such, coaching in Test cricket is more akin to coaching in individual sports such as golf or tennis, whilst coaching in limited-overs cricket is closer to the determination of team tactics one associates with team sports like football and rugby. This is a fascinating and wonderful book about the use of statistics in cricket, which reveals some surprising truths which have only been revealed over the last few years since the widespread use of Hawkeye.