The process of selecting England’s squad for next year’s Ashes began this week, using the ECB’s innovative camera technology, which costs £500,000 a year.
Led by performance analysis leader Stafford Murray, the Loughborough-based boffins will use their vast data set, along with expert input from the likes of England coach Brendon McCullum and captain Ben Stokes, to produce a snapshot of what is a winning test team in Australian conditions.
They will then find the English football players whose individual characteristics come closest to the required mould.
As demonstrated last year by the selection of Shoaib Bashir, a player with a bowling average of 67 in the County Championship, for the Test tour of India, England are already set on the path of modern selection methods . Bashir’s high release point, seen as an essential ingredient for successful spinners on the subcontinent, was promoted by scientists and his inclusion was approved when the management liked what they saw at an Emirates training camp.
Thanks to the data provided by the iHawk system (a camera placed on the umpire’s chest on the bowler’s side that records the trajectories, speeds, deviations and bounces of each delivery in domestic cricket), England no longer recognizes only what has been done. made a player, but also what they could do in different conditions.
Ben Stokes (right) and Brendon McCullum (left) look to find a winning formula to succeed in Australia
They will use iHawk camera technology, which costs £500,000 a year, to try to find the best county game options for Australian conditions.
Mail Sport’s Richard Gibson (left) and Aadam Patel (right) went to check out the innovative technology.
So, for example, if scientists suggest that England needs a bowler who is over six-and-a-half feet tall, another capable of maintaining 87 miles per hour all day long, and a left-arm spinner who consistently swings the ball more than X degrees To create the most potent attack for their 2025-26 tour, they will focus on the best matches in the county game rather than poring over the numbers of those who excel here and now.
“It’s a huge project we’ve just started, about what it takes to win the Ashes,” Murray said, explaining that while it is data-driven, it inevitably incorporates the knowledge of coaches and players past and present.
“We’ll synthesize all of that into a ‘what does it take to win’ model and then work from that – what do we need, what type of player do we need – and then we can start to drill down into the selection from there.” .
‘If we are brave, which I know we will be, we will select the series before the Ashes with the Ashes in mind. “It is a combination and a continuous, iterative process that works towards a long-term goal.”
In other words, those given Test opportunities later this year against the West Indies, Sri Lanka, Pakistan and New Zealand will not necessarily be the ones considered the next taxis out of the rankings: the batsmen and bowlers at the peak of their respective careers. and window graphics.
England had previously thought outside the box with their selections, choosing inexperienced player Shoaib Bashir (pictured) for their tour of India earlier this year.
“A backward performance approach,” Murray admits, “may seem a little strange,” but he has experience with such models working across several sports in his previous roles with the Great Britain and New Zealand Olympic teams.
Interestingly, the application of non-traditional assessment, ignoring results and focusing on qualities, aligns with the Bazball culture that Rob Key, the ECB’s director of men’s cricket, chose to appoint as captain and coach of the England Test team. two years ago this month.
From the beginning, McCullum and Stokes publicly supported players such as Zak Crawley, who they believed possessed the potential to win matches, but not necessarily consistency.
‘Instead of just looking at averages and traditional statistics, we actually measure the “impact” of the person. What effect his action had on the outcome of the game,” Murray explained.
England backed Zak Crawley (pictured) when he was struggling for runs and are determined to pick players they believe will thrive in certain conditions.
‘By looking at ball quality through iHawk, we can measure whether your shot or ball had a positive or negative impact on the probability of that match.
‘If you add and synthesize all those impacts, you can see how much impact they had. They may have only scored 23, but in reality, if you look at their impact, it was greater than someone who scored 40. Traditional statistics often don’t paint a contextual picture.
Detailed analysis of iHawk data, tested by the ECB across 200 matches in 2023 but not comprehensive across county play until last month, was until now reserved for those playing internationally.
However, applying it to identify those whose attributes should make them successful in England’s environment is a game-changer according to Murray, who said: “We are the only country that does this.” This is serious, serious innovation. To obtain accurate tracking information from a single camera…. We’re right at the end of the future collapse.’