Tag: profitability

ICC pitch-rating system is regulatory subversion

In today’s edition of The Hindu, Rebecca Rose Varghese and Vignesh Radhakrishnan have a particularly noteworthy edition of their ‘Data Point’ column – ‘noteworthy’ because they’ve used data to make concrete something we’ve all been feeling for a while, in the way we sometimes know something to be true even though we don’t have hard evidence, and which found prominent articulation in the words of Rohit Sharma in a recent interview.

Sharma was commenting on the ICC’s pitch-rating system, saying pitches everywhere should be rated consistently instead of those in the subcontinent earning poorer ratings more of the time.

Rebecca and Vignesh analysed matches and their pitch-ratings between May 14, 2019, and December 26, 2023, to find:

  1. Pitches in India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka receive ‘below average’ or ‘poor’ ratings for Test matches more often than Test pitches in Australia, West Indies, England, South Africa, and New Zealand;
  2. In Test matches played in India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka, spin bowling claimed more wickets than pace bowling; and
  3. When spin bowling claims more wickets than pace bowling in Test matches, the former pitches are rated worse than the latter pitches even if both sets of matches conclude after a relatively lower number of balls have been faced.

This is just fantastic. (1) and (2) together imply the ICC has penalised pitches in the subcontinent for being spin-friendly tracks. And this and (3) imply that this penalty doesn’t care for the fact that non-spin-friendly tracks produce similar results without incurring the same penalty.

The longer a Test match lasts, the better it is for stadiums and TV networks broadcasting the match: the stadium can sell tickets for all five days and networks can broadcast advertisements for Test matches on all five days. This thinking has come to dominate ODIs, T20s, and Test matches, but it’s a sad irony that the ICC created the ODI and the T20 formats to be more entertaining and more profitable without compromising the Test format. Now, with the ICC’s pitch-rating system, this entertainment + profitability thinking has percolated through Test matches as well.

Sharma alluded to this when he said:

I mean, we saw what happened in this match, how the pitch played and stuff like that. I honestly don’t mind playing on pitches like this. As long as everyone keeps their mouth shut in India and don’t talk too much about Indian pitches, honestly.

I’d take this further and say Test match pitches can’t be rated badly because the purpose of this format is to test players in the toughest conditions the sport can offer. In this milieu, to say a Test match pitch is ‘below average’ is to discourage teams from confronting their opponents’ batters with a track that favours bowlers’ strengths. And in the ICC’s limited view, this discouragement is biased markedly against spin-bowling.

Criticism of this paradigm isn’t without foundation. The A Cricketing View Substack wrote in a February 2021 post (hat-tip to Vignesh):

The Laws of Cricket only specify that the game not be played on a pitch which umpires might consider to be dangerous to the health of the players. The ICC has chosen to go beyond this elementary classification between dangerous and non-dangerous pitches by setting up a regulatory mechanism which is designed to minimize the probability that a bad pitch (and not just a dangerous pitch) will be prepared.

If anything, a bad pitch that results in uneven and potentially high bounce will be more dangerous to batters than a bad pitch that results in sharp turn. So the ICC’s pitch-rating system isn’t “regulatory expansion” – as A Cricketing View called it – but regulatory subversion. R. Ashwin has also questioned the view the ICC has taken, via its system, that pitches shouldn’t offer sharp turn on day 1 – another arbitrary choice, although one that makes sense from the entertainment and/or profitability PoV, that restricts ‘average’ or better spin-bowling in its view to a very specific kind of surface.

Point (3) in the ‘Data Point’ implies such pitches probably exist in places like Australia and South Africa, which are otherwise havens of pace-bowling. The advantage that pace enjoys in the ICC’s system creates another point of divergence when it meets players’ physiology. Pitches in Australia in particular are pace-friendly, but when they’re not, they’re not spin friendly either. On these tracks, Australian pacers still have an advantage because they’re taller on average and able to generate more bounce than shorter bowlers, such as those from India.

I believe Test matches should be played on tracks that teach all 22 players (of both teams) a valuable lesson – without of course endangering players’ bodies.

  1. How will stadiums and TV networks make more money off Test matches? The bigger question, to me, is: should they? I’m aware of the role stadiums have played through history in making specific sports more sustainable by monetising spectatorship. But perhaps stadiums should be organised such that the bulk of their revenue is from ODI and T20 matches and Test matches are spared the trouble of being more entertaining/profitable.
  2. Who decides what these lessons should be? I don’t trust the ICC, of course, but I don’t trust the BCCI either because I don’t trust the people who currently staff it to avoid making a habit of tit-for-tat measures – beyond one-off games – that massage Indian teams’ player-records. Other countries’ cricket boards may be different but given the effects of the ICC’s system on their specific fortunes, I’m not sure how they will react. In fact, it seems impossible that we will all agree on these lessons or how their suitability should be measured – a conclusion that, ironically, speaks to the singular pitfall of judging the value of a cricket match by its numbers.

Beat-sculpting, money-making and science journalism

Money is not always just money but also economic relevance. Mr. Benjamin Franklin likely agrees.

Today, my class had two guests. Malcolm Ritter, whose Twitter profile reads “Associated Press science reporter”, is not just any science reporter. He’s been covering science for AP for over 30 years now. While Dan Fagin said Ritter’s journey through journalism might not be relevant to our class considering he made a name for himself before the new media wave swept through, Ritter’s answers to our questions revealed a skills set brilliantly honed by three decades of reporting.

Our second guest was Andrea Thompson, a senior science writer at Climate Central and an alumnus of the program she was now addressing, from 2005. Until recently, Andrea was with Live Science before switching to CC.

With Dan “compering”, my classmates and I had many questions for the duo. I had two the answers to which revealed some informative differences between newsrooms in India and the United States. Here they are.

You’re both beat journalists. Dan also mentioned something about science journalism having become very competitive recently. In this setting, how protective of your beats have you had to be [within the organization]?

This question may have mildly startled our guests, neither of whom had a specific answer in that they had nothing to say about my concern. Dan jumped in and clarified that when he said ‘competitive’ – whenever he said it – he didn’t mean journalists pushing their colleagues on the same beat out of their way. I said then that, though I wasn’t disputing him, I had worked for a couple years in India in an environment where people often competed to simply retain their beats, and that that’s what prompted my question.

I don’t have to stress on the point that having a beat all to yourself can be very comforting. Apart from working secure in the knowledge that only you produce the news on whatever your beat is, you also get to sculpt your employer-institution’s attitude toward happenings in that beat, which can be a powerful exercise, as well as your audience’s. But herein lies the rub.

Dan equated the presence of multiple journalists (from the same org.) working on common beats to the organization’s success – which is almost obviously true. If a newspaper puts multiple journalists on the same beat (which The Hindu did; not sure if it does anymore), then

  1. It must enjoy a large and loyal readership for whom so-so beat must be covered in great detail
  2. It must be able to afford putting two, three or four journalists on the same beat

Dan continued, “Here [in the United States], companies are short-staffed.” His choice of words implies that they’re more likely not doing well than that they intend to run a lean organization. By extension, the ‘rub’ is that your opportunity to be ‘beat-sculpting’ is more accessible if you’re writing for a smaller audience – which is kind of ironic. (Remember at this point that I’m writing based on just two experiences: talking to Dan and working with a newspaper publisher in India.)

How do journalists at publications like The New York Times and The Guardian organize their beats? This is what I’d like to know.

My second question:

How much influence does the business model of your employer wield over how you write?

Again, this was a question that didn’t bring forth eager answers. I was disappointed with myself for not being able to ask the “right” questions… but only briefly, recalling that I was among a bunch of people wanting to talk about science writing, not the business that surrounded it. I also think now that I should’ve worded my question differently, and perhaps asked it to someone else.

Earlier, in response to someone else, Malcolm Ritter had recounted that there were a lot of newspapers in the United States in the early 1990s that sported dedicated science pages (similar to what The New York Times and The Hindu continue to publish to this day), and that by the close of the decade, all those sections had either been truncated or assimilated into the rest of the paper. Dan and Malcolm agreed that this was because science news wasn’t bringing in the money.

Next, as the 2000s labored on, publishers began to realize that science writing could be cool as well as impactful when done right, and there were, and continue to be, a lot of people to do it right. At this point: I believe remaining unmindful of the exact reasons why science journalism saw a decline and then an improvement in prospects endangers our ability to keep science journalism always relevant. It seems social forces cannot be entrusted with this task because why else would dedicated science sections disappear and then start from scratch in building a case to reappear?

The economic forces hold the key.

In this context, science journalists shouldn’t be concerned only for the wellbeing of their beats or the people or the trees or whatever but also for the future of their unique profession. They should not be completely insulated from the business side of their work, and this goes far beyond simple populist ideals and toward engendering an entrepreneurial streak of thinking about new forms of publishing and channels of revenue, at least specific to as exacting an enterprise as science journalism.

This is what I expected our guests to talk about when I asked my question. But I think now that I got my audience wrong, not to mention my lousy wording.

What do you think?