Do matchups really work?
Is it possible that matchups are nonsense and we should all trust the guts of our captains?
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Lord’s 1932, grey men sit in a room and watch footage of Don Bradman bat. They are desperate, he is the greatest run scorer ever, and they need a way to stop him. Their next Ashes depends on them finding something.
When Bradman faces a short ball, England captain, Douglas Jardine says, “I’ve got it, he’s yellow”. And they all pop their champagne corks as Jardine plans to bowl short fast balls at Don Bradman. This is not cricket’s first match up, it is just one of many.
People hate matchups. They take away from their favourite part of cricket, a magical soothsayer captain guru who conjures wickets from the farts of angels. So when they see an offspinner take a right-hander, and they shout, see, see, we told you that matchups don’t make sense.
So is it possible that matchups are nonsense and we should all trust the guts of our captains?
At the Oval in 2021, Virat Kohli said that R Ashwin had been left out of a Test because they wanted Ravi Jadeja to bowl to all of England’s left-handers. This was a matchup-based comment, and yet it goes against the normal, bowl-off spin to lefties. Matchups are complicated, partly because cricket is.
In the World Cup semi-final, we saw that Travis Head took two wickets with his off-spin against right-handers, and then himself was dismissed by Keshav Maharaj, an SLA. And again match-ups were confusing.
The best way of explaining matchups is that they are not a certainty, but just weighing things in your favour. But that World Cup semi-final is certainly worth looking at.
Travis Head is a proper part-time option. So he prefers bowling to left-handers, which makes sense because he is an offie. But he bowled just 41 overs between the 2019 World Cup and the semi-final against South Africa. So, you’d want to take these averages with a pinch of salt when you account for the sample size. He dismissed 2 right-handers and 2 left-handers, bowled about the same amount of overs to each, and was less expensive against lefties than righties.
But here’s the catch. One of those right-handers was actually Klaasen. Now, Klaasen had been in terrific form in the World Cup cycle, as well as in the World Cup. Here are his numbers by bowling type since the 2019 World Cup. So he doesn’t quite have a weak bowling type. As far as off-spin is concerned, he attacks it a lot more but also gets out to it quite often.
Klaasen got out trying to sweep Head in the series before the World Cup. This time, he was well set on 39 when Head came on to bowl in the 31st over. Klaasen hit him for a couple of fours, and then got out playing inside the line to a delivery that came in and hit the middle and leg.
Matchups aren’t always about just following the general trends. Sometimes, captains have to improvise based on their gut feeling too, boundary sizes, pitch conditions, game situations and the form of other bowlers and shit happens. Cummins probably felt Klaasen would want to take on Head, and they might end up forcing an error from him in that precarious match situation.
That was the last recognized batting pair for South Africa. Even though Jansen had been pretty handy with the bat in the World Cup, this was a much different scenario. He had not faced a single ball of off-spin in this World Cup, considering his normal entry points in the death overs.
Jansen got stuck on the crease and missed the ball, which would go on to crash leg stump even after he took a review.
How do off-break and SLA bowlers perform by batting hand? We looked up the numbers for all the World Cup teams, West Indies and Zimbabwe so that the results aren’t too skewed.
These trends make a lot of sense. Right-handers usually prefer off-spin, while left-handers prefer left-arm orthodox. On average, batters of both types score more runs, and are quicker when the ball is coming into them rather than going away.
Keshav Maharaj dismissed Travis Head, which again goes against the obvious trend. But there is more to it. He is one of the top SLAs around, which was evident during the World Cup. So while he is obviously a lot better against right-handers, his record against lefties more than holds up when you compare him to the average SLA. And he has actually been more economical against the southpaws in this 4 year time period.
In contrast, Travis Head absolutely murders SLAs. But he hadn’t faced Keshav Maharaj in the series before the World Cup, who bowled a brilliant delivery to get him out of the very first delivery that he bowled in the match.
Matchups also depend on when a bowler is best suited to bowl. So Maharaj obviously bowls predominantly in the middle-overs phase. He does like to bowl right after the powerplay with the slightly older ball, averaging less than 20 and going at 3.72 runs per over.
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