The process of selecting the England squad for next year’s Ashes began this week, using the ECB’s groundbreaking £500,000-a-year camera technology.
Led by head of performance analytics Stafford Murray, the Loughborough boffins will use their vast trove of data, combined with expert input from the likes of England coach Brendon McCullum and captain Ben Stokes, to create a photo-fit of how a winning Test team is put together. Australian conditions are similar.
They will then find the players from the English game whose individual characteristics most closely approximate the required model.
As they proved last year with 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 well on their way to modern selection methods. Bashir’s high release point – seen as a vital ingredient for successful spinners in the subcontinent – was promoted by the scientists and his inclusion was approved when the management liked what they saw at a training camp in the Emirates.
Thanks to data from the iHawk system – a camera attached to the umpire’s chest at the bowler’s end that records the trajectories, speeds, deviations and bounce of every delivery in domestic cricket – England no longer just embraces what a player has done, but also what he did. they might do this under different circumstances.
Ben Stokes (right) and Brendon McCullum (left) look for a winning formula to succeed in Australia
They will use £500,000-a-year iHawk camera technology to try and find the best fits from the county game for Australian conditions
Mail Sport’s Richard Gibson (left) and Aadam Patel (right) went to see the groundbreaking technology
So for example, if the boffins suggest that England need a bowler who is taller than 6ft, another who can maintain 80 miles per hour all day and a left-armed player who consistently swings the ball more than X degrees to the left. to create the most potent attack for their 2025-26 tour, they will focus on the best combinations from the county game rather than delving into the numbers of those who excel in the 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-based, it will inevitably require the knowledge of coaches and players past and present. includes the past.
“We’ll synthesize all of that into a ‘what it takes to win’ model and then we’ll work from there – what do we need, what type of player do we need, and then we can start delving into it from there the selection .
‘If we are brave, and I’m sure we will be, we will select in series before the Ashes with the Ashes in mind. It’s a mix and it’s an ongoing, iterative process that works toward a long-term goal.”
In other words, those who get Test opportunities against the West Indies, Sri Lanka, Pakistan and New Zealand later this year will not necessarily be those considered the next taxis of the rankings: the batters and bowlers at the top of their respective runs are listed. and wickets cards.
England have previously thought outside the box with their selections, picking inexperienced spinner Shoaib Bashir (pictured) for their tour of India earlier this year
“A performance-backward approach,” Murray admits, “may look a bit strange,” but he has experience with such models in several sports in his previous roles with the Olympic teams in Great Britain and New Zealand.
Intriguingly, the application of non-traditional evaluation, which ignores outcomes and focuses on qualities, fits in with the Bazball culture that Rob Key, the ECB’s men’s cricket director, aspired to when he took over the captain and appointed the England coaching team.
From the start, McCullum and Stokes publicly backed players like Zak Crawley who they believed possessed match-winning potential but not necessarily consistency.
‘Instead of just looking at averages and traditional statistics, we actually measure the “impact” of the person. What effect their action had on the outcome of the match,” Murray explained.
England backed Zak Crawley (pictured) as he struggled for points and are determined to pick players they believe will thrive in certain circumstances
‘By looking at the quality of the ball through iHawk, we can measure whether their shot or their ball has a positive or negative influence on the chance of that match.
‘If you add up and synthesize all those impacts, you can see how much impact they have had. Maybe they only had 23, but if you look at his impact, it was greater than someone who scored 40. Traditional statistics often do not really provide a contextual picture.’
iHawk’s detailed data analysis – trialled by the ECB in 200 matches in 2023, but not exhaustive for provincial matches until last month – has until now been reserved for players playing internationally.
However, its application to identify those whose attributes should make them successful in an English environment is a game changer according to Murray, who said: ‘We are the only country doing this. This is some serious, serious innovation. To get accurate tracking information from a single camera…. we are at the tipping point of futurology.”
The England & Wales Cricket Board (ECB) will use iHawk technology in every domestic match this season to capture player performance data, which will then be used to support the identification and selection of talent within England teams.
England are currently the only country in the world to use this technology, which records a range of key information including speed, swing, seam movement and release height via a Go Pro camera on the referee.
Mail Sport was invited to Lord’s to try out iHawk and our reporters Aadam Patel and Richard Gibson gave it a try. Put it this way. Brendon McCullum or Ben Stokes won’t be calling us anytime soon…