Being Warren Gatland; The rise of the Super Coach; And v Either/Or; Kick it v Run it; Zero latency; Super Bowl betting shop; Test cricketer as coal miner; Trott on Purpose; LIV's shirt strategy
Overthinking the sports business, for money
Warren Gatland is one of the most successful rugby coaches of the professional era.
His career has coincided with the rise of The Leadership Industry, which seeks to attribute the performance of organisations almost entirely to the actions and behaviour of the people in charge.
Cue the cult of the manager, an idiocy that Gatland has little time for.
So this was a nice opportunity to talk about what it’s like, seeing himself and his decisions filtered through the various news and comment cycles.
You can hear the result here.
Spotted in the wild: The Feel v Data Binary
Stuart Barnes offers a classic of the genre.
Two caricatures are offered up: The Artist and The Engineer.
England coach Steve Borthwick is accused of ‘referring to data’.
Ireland coach Andy Farrell is quoted as saying: ‘There is no data for humans’.
(I wouldn’t want Farrell as my doctor).
These straw men frame the story Barnes wants to tell.
The data reference renders Borthwick as a dull, leaden Roundhead.
Farrell is painted as a creative, instinctive Cavalier.
It’s total balls obviously. As Stuart Barnes no doubt knows well.
But in the opinion industry, two things can’t be right at the same time.
There is no room for And, only Either/Or.
The problem is in part structural.
We often talk about how the internet has ruined the business model of news: The macro of ad revenue disruption, selling newspapers in a digital age etc.
But it’s also wreaked havoc on the micro, the article.
Before the internet, the job was to answer the basic questions of reporting: what, where and when.
Today, everyone knows the answers before they turn to the mainstream media.
So the basic unit of journalism, the article, has changed from reporting what happened to explaining why it happened.
This is a problem, because why it happened is a really difficult and complex question.
Somewhere in the rush for simple solutions, the Super Coach became the default storytelling device.
Spoiler: There is no conflict between data and creativity.
Access to player performance data doesn’t conflict with the job of performing with flair, imagination and being able to respond in the moment to changes in the game, to capitalise on superior judgement and execute effectively.
Kick it v Run it
To illustrate the nuanced role of performance data, Gatland referenced a statistic that’s become a talking point among coaches.
Warren Gatland: I'll just give you one of them at the moment, in rugby union, when you’ve got two teams around about the same level of, say, a tier one nation or a tier two nation, or even club rugby.
There’s this one stat: The team that kicks the ball (from the hand) the most is actually winning about 75% of the games against the other team.
We lost last week to Ireland. They kicked it 29 times. We kicked it 23 times in the game.
Now however you want to look at that stat and break it down, that's up to you.
But the simple fact is that if you look at the team that kicks the ball the most is winning 75% of the games.
So if you're a coach and you know those numbers, and you wanna win: What are you saying to your team?
The point being made is that there’s a mass of data available.
There is a danger of isolation, of falling in love with a statistic, just because it seems to push you toward a decision, or strategy.
See also, Ed Smith on decision making in the era of Big Data.
Incentives and The WIPL Auction
The Women's IPL Auction has changed the game in terms of player earnings.
Andy Marston did a handy list:
🇮🇳 Smriti Mandhana 🔜 Royal Challengers Bangalore - £340k (Rs 3.4 Crore)
🏴 Nat Sciver 🔜 Mumbai Indians - £320k (Rs 3.2 Crore)
🇦🇺 Ashleigh Gardner 🔜 Gujarat Giants - £320k (Rs 3.2 Crore)
🇮🇳 Deepti Sharma 🔜 UP Warriorz - £260k (Rs 2.6 Crore)
🇮🇳 Jemimah Rodrigues 🔜 Delhi Capitals - £220k (Rs 2.2 Crore)
That is for 3 weeks work... to put that in perspective, it is reported that Sam Kerr, the best women's footballer in the world, earns around £400k per year.
What happens next? Technique will follow the money
The market has signalled to every young female cricketer aspiring to play professionally. Be a T20 player.
The phrase ‘test match cricketer’ is beginning to sound like ‘coal miner’ or ‘shipbuilder’. Worthy, but soon to be redundant.
But how easy is it to change a classic test match opener to a 360 degree T20 hitter?
Mo Bobat, the ECB’s head of performance, said something that’s stayed with me: It’s less about technique than it is about appetite for risk.
Technical change isn't that difficult. I think fundamentally, it's probably easier to have solid red ball basics and adapt to white ball cricket than the other way around. And there might come a point where the white ball game becomes that far removed from red ball cricket that that isn't the case.
The other way around can be quite tricky.
But I would say that the psychological stuff precedes the technical. The reason we might see someone like a Dom Sibley play the way he plays and you might think he's not suited to a whiteboard game. People might quickly go to ‘his technique doesn't allow it’. I would argue his mindset is the thing that's different and it's what gives him his super strength as a test cricketer, but might present some challenges as white ball cricketer. So I would say the psychology is far more important than the technique.
See also: I talked to Eoin Morgan about this question in 2007. This was pre-IPL and he was a teenager just getting in to the Ireland team. Morgan is arguably one of the most influential cricketers of his generation. He retired this week. Time flies and all that.
See also: Good article on the Saudi influence on the size of Ladies European Tour prize purses and what that means.
Trott on purpose
Dave Trott, via Richard Shotton.
The journey from strategy to execution: Golf’s Drive To Survive play
Full Swing landed this week.
The Telegraph’s Alan Tyers didn’t love it.
In that spirit, and as a golf agnostic, let me say this: Netflix’s new series Full Swing aims to do for golf what Drive To Survive did for Formula One... but shanks it horribly off the tee, into a pond, tries to roll its trousers up and hit the ball out of the pond, falls over in the pond, gets into difficulty, needs rescuing by a frogman, eventually catches Weil’s disease and suffers massive organ failure and dies, horribly, propped up on an uncomfortable chintz banquette in a clubhouse being yelled at by a double-glazing salesman about how many miles to a gallon he gets in the Audi
‘Pannick on the Streets of London’
From Tariq Panja’s NY Times piece on Man City
Manchester City might be the only soccer club in England whose fans would unfurl a 100-foot banner to herald the hiring of the team’s newest lawyer. Yet there it was on Sunday: six-foot-high block letters in City’s sky blue, bracketed by the club’s crest and the lawyer’s photo and declaring, “Pannick on the Streets of London.”
The banner, a winking reference to a song by The Smiths, celebrated the news that City, bracing for its battle with the Premier League, had retained the services of the respected British lawyer David Pannick. And while the fans’ public devotion to the club’s newest cause, and its newest champion, was colorful, it was not particularly unusual.
See also: UP256 The Godfather of Sports Law.
Betting on the Super Bowl and the Holy Grail of Zero Latency
Some signal from the noise, via Keith Stoler.
GeoComply registered 100million sports betting transactions from Super Bowl weekend, a 25% increase.
FanDuel averaged 2million active users, taking 50,000 bets per second.
Then, the kicker:
‘FOX Sports had almost zero latency in streaming the game, which means that live betting on every play will become a reality before you know it’
We’ll make it back in shirt sales, and other sports marketing myths
I’m off to buy a Majesticks head cover.
See also: When Nike put their shirts in a bottle
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