Andy Flower plays the Moneyball card

It's no secret that Andy Flower is a Moneyball guy, a fan of Michael Lewis's book on Billy Beane and the Oakland As baseball team - an underfunded and unfashionable franchise made into winners by Beane's attention to statistical detail.

Peter Moores turned Flower onto Beane's methods, which worked because he realised that traditional baseball stats like Runs Batted In weren't particularly effective in measuring performance, even though everyone in the game used them and had done for a century. Some fans of fantasy baseball found better ones to run their teams, and Beane employed them to analyse players for him.

Ever since Lewis's book, every sport has tried to find its version of Moneyball. Andy Flower found Nathan Leamon, a mathematician from Cambridge University who was also a qualified coach, and provided a well-funded black-ops stats department at the ECB for him to use [it's easy to imagine A-Flo wrapping an arm around Nathan's shoulders and telling him to 'think the unthinkable...']. Flower has been even more guarded than usual when he's been asked about the numbers being run, saying only that the work was 'very interesting' - at least until last weekend, and piece by Simon Wilde in the Sunday Times.

Wilde's story [unfortunately behind the humble Rupert's paywall] revealed something of Leamon's methods. The boy's gone to town and then some. England's enthusiasm for Hawkeye extends way beyond the DRS - they've used to it log and analyse every ball delivered in Test match cricket around the world in the last five years.

With access to such vast data they now run simulations of every Test match they play, taking into account venue, conditions, selection and pitch. Leamon reckons that such 'games', when he checks them against the actual matches, 'are accurate to within four or five percent'.

Other work has been in breaking down pitches in areas for bowlers to aim at: Leamon claims England's palpable success against Sachin Tendulkar was due in part to statistical analysis that showed Sachin made the bulk of his runs on the leg side until he reached fifty.

'It's all about asking the right questions,' Leamon told Wilde, 'which can be the short cut to six months of work. A lot of the old ways of looking at the technique of opponents leads to guesswork - feet position, how they hold the bat. Hawkeye enables you to come up with answers'.

Unlikely though it is that Flower and Leamon would reveal much of what they know to a newspaper, it is nonetheless strangely comforting that five years of work has simply produced a shortcut to knowledge rather than anything more revelatory, because if the numbers had unpicked the game, had stripped it back to a simple series of probabilities, some of its deep and human mysteries would have been lost.

Moneyball worked for Billy Beane in part because every franchise plays hundreds of games per season and the vast majority aren't watched by the other coaches and teams. Test matches are much rarer things, and are more closely observed. And Moneyball only really worked until all of the other teams knew about it and started using the same information. Once they did, the variables of power and money that Beane had overcome reasserted themselves.

Baseball is also a more mechanical game than cricket. The batter only really has one swing, so his ability to adapt is compromised to a far greater degree than, say, Tendulkar's who, lest we forget, once made a double hundred in Australia without hitting a single cover drive - on purpose. The numbers are beautiful and fascinating, but as Rahul Dravid said last week, cricket is a game 'played in the space of the mind', and that is more fascinating and beautiful still.

Why Andy Flower got it wrong with Monty

Monty Panesar's career has been haunted by Shane Warne's one-liner: 'He's not played 30 Tests, he's played the same Test 30 times'. It was a piece of dressing room wisdom that capped Monty's destructive reputation for guilelessness, the Frank Spencer of left-arm spin.

It somehow seems more than five years ago that Panesar took the first of his 126 Test wickets - Sachin Tendulkar was his duck-breaker, Rahul Dravid his third. Inzamam ul-Haq, Mohammad Yousuf and Younis Khan followed the next summer. Monty was good enough for the best.

Since his move to Sussex, he's been doing pretty much everything right, trying to reconcile the need to grow his game while remaining in touch with the innate skill he produced so naturally at first.

When he had the chance to go and bowl at the world's premier batsman in the nets a few weeks ago, he took the initiative, just as everyone kept telling him he needed to do. He jumped in his car, got himself down to Lord's and turned his arm over for Sachin Tendulkar.

'I thought it would be a chance to get some tips for my bowling,' he said. 'These things are great opportunities and it gave me the chance to add further development to my game'.

Andy Flower took a different view. Flower called Monty 'naive'. Monty, being Monty, will probably roll over and agree. He shouldn't. He is not contracted to England, just to Sussex. He's 29 years old and has responsibility for his own career. If he thinks that bowling at Tendulkar will help him, he has every right to do so.

Flower has been revelatory in his time with England. He is a hugely impressive man, deserving of respect. He is wrong in this instance, though. His concern should not be Sachin Tendulkar, who, let's face it, after 14,000 runs is probably going to get a few more at some point regardless of who bowls at him in the nets or in the Test matches. His concern should be for Monty, who is the sort of man who will take being called 'naive' by the England Team Director to heart.

Even if Flower was able to make his case for Panesar bowling to Tendulkar as being detrimental to England, this was an issue best handled with a quiet word in private. Monty deserved better than a public slapping down in a way that reinforces a perceived weakness in his make-up.

Going with the A-Flo

One man not mentioned in dispatches below deserves more than just his medal. Taking over from his former boss a captainless team riven by strife, Andy Flower has produced first an Ashes winning side and then the T20 champions.

There's something zen about A-Flo. He says so little, what he does say carries weight. His philosophy is a combination of will, knowledge and statistical analysis. More than that, England's players know he will never look them in the eye and ask them to do something he hasn't done himself.

Expect him to entirely shave his head and start sitting on a mat staring at a wall any time now. As long as the wall has a full stat breakdown by Gemma Broad written on it. All coaches have a lifespan, but let's hope his is as long as Fletch's. That old CLR James nugget has proven true again: 'what does he know of cricket who only cricket knows...?'

Ravi Bopara and Phenomenological Reality

Reality, n. what is real; the state of things as they actually exist.

The reality of being England's coach:

27 March 2009, Bridgetown, Barbados

Ten minutes before the 3rd ODI between West Indies and England. Sky Sports transmit a new interview with Ravi Bopara, conducted by Nasser Hussain.

Nasser Hussain: 'Fidel Edwards has bowled some terrific spells'.

Ravi Bopara: 'Yeah, his short ball is ten yards quicker than his normal ball'.

27 March, 2009, Bridgetown, Barbados

3rd ODI,West Indies versus England

Fourth ball of the sixth over. Cricinfo commentary: 'Edwards to Bopara OUT. That's awful from Bopara. Quick and aggressive. Bopara tried to hook and it got big on him. The ball made its limp and feeble way to mid-on'.

You see, you can tell them and tell them, but you can't do it for them... For Andy Flower and for England too, much now depends on Friday's final ODI. 

Those who argue that reality can only be experienced as a personal interpretation of events will say that it all comes down to how you see it:

England win the match, and the series: They have come through a difficult winter with an ODI series win. They were narrowly defeated in the Tests following a fluke collapse that can be explained by the delayed shock of the Pietersen affair. They responded by coming within one and then two wickets of winning the next two matches. Andrew Strauss, the player of the winter, and Andy Flower have formed a strong bond and need time to develop their team.

England lose the match, and the series: They have been beaten in all formats by a team they should have defeated. They have won only two games, one of them because of a clerical error. Strauss and Flower have failed to convince Kevin Pietersen, the team's premier batsman, and morale remains suspect. They are, essentially, a second choice captain and a second choice coach.

Which way will it go? Depends how you look at it, really.

Inside Harmi's bubble

'Andy Flower told me I was being left out because I wasn't bowling quick enough nor was I hostile enough for what they wanted. I was bitterly disappointed. It was not the right time to take it up with Andrew Strauss, but when we get to Trinidad I want to sit down with him over a beer or over a meal and see where we stand'.

What part of 'you're not bowling quick enough, or hostile enough' does Steve Harmison not understand, then? It is, after all,  one of the more direct pieces of criticism - sorry, feedback - a fast bowler can be given. And has it not yet struck him as odd that, even when he's in the team, he doesn't usually get the new ball? Does he not wonder, when he throws up after a couple of overs because it's hot, how fit he actually is?

Perhaps he can ask one of England's many analysts to help him read between the lines of Andy Flower's other comments: 'Fast bowling is long, hard work and at the age of 30 it is only going to get harder work, so it is up to Steve really. If hard work is just a base that you start with, then that is what he's doing at the moment, but for you to be a successful international cricketer you have to be very hungry. Only he knows how hungry he is to carry on the hard yakka of a fast bowler's life'.

Inside the Harmi bubble, a 'beer' or a 'meal' with Andrew Strauss might bring understanding. The rest of us have already heard it loud and clear, Steve.

NB: Andy Flower, laying it down in plain English. Refreshing.