And at every step we will learn more about the game we love. Every new technology will reveal fresh insights into her complex heart. And yet, for all that, for all our advances in understanding, cricket will always keep her secrets, there will always be a level of mystery she won’t let us penetrate. We will never know it all.

The data is never enough on its own. But expert insight buttressed by objective fact has a far better chance of being truth than myth and story.

Data democratises truth.

As you rise through the ranks of experience within the game, from First Class, to international, to Test captain, quite naturally your authority to speak about it grows. And in the absence of objective truth we accept the revealed insights of the most experienced among us as fact.

The world of sports expertise has traditionally run itself like a mediaeval guild. In the absence of objective facts, the dominant source of information is the revealed truth of those higher up in the guild.

The second part of the approach laid out in Moneyball was taking advantage of market inefficiencies. It was the science of identifying and buying bargains when it came to players. As one of the characters in the film says, ‘Remember, you aren’t buying players, you’re buying wins.’

There were two distinct parts to the Moneyball approach, to the way in which the Oakland A’s used data to level the playing field against their wealthier competitors. The first part was in gaining a tactical advantage. They were the first club to take analysis seriously as a way of finding better ways to win baseball games.

occurring discrete units into which to break it down. Football is about as hard as any sport to analyse statistically. In the middle of the scale you have sports such as cricket, rugby and American football. They can be broken down into discrete units more easily (very easily in the case of cricket), but other factors create complexity. Way out at

There is a continuum of sports when it comes to the application of data-based thinking. The internal structure and workings of each sport dictate how easy it is to analyse statistically in a way that allows you to add value to subjective judgements and received wisdom. At one end of the scale you have football, a set of fluid continually changing