The batting age curve
“An age of around 32 is reckoned to be the best for batsmen,” wrote S Rajesh and Shiva Jayaraman for The Cricket Monthly last year, “but in the current decade, older has definitely been better.”
The records of Misbah and Sangakkara, among others, have certainly helped challenge the received wisdom that test batsmen peak in their early thirties. However, we shouldn’t let the few get in the way of the many – at what age does a typical batter peak?
Why James Vince failed
I’ve been intruiged by James Vince’s short test career since stumbling upon this statistic:
A revealing stat on James Vince that @BRGMarlow and I discovered – scored 63% of first class runs in 4s & 6s. Test top order average is 51%.
— Omar Chaudhuri (@OmarChaudhuri) July 19, 2016
In the replies to that tweet, Gwilym Lockwood provided some great insight on boundary runs and Matt Roller wrote some more here.
A question of scheduling
Stoke away. Arsenal away. Man United away. Everton away. Tottenham away. Chelsea away. Man City away. Newcastle away.
Liverpool’s opening run of away games in 2015-16 read like a death wish for Brendan Rodgers’ team – and indeed his own fortunes. Yet on the flip side, their home games in the same period promised a healthy return of points: Bournemouth, West Ham, Norwich, Aston Villa, Southampton, Crystal Palace, Swansea, West Brom.
This got 5 Added Minutes thinking: what’s preferable – a collection of ‘hard’ (i.e. vs good opposition) away games with ‘easy’ (i.e. vs weak opposition) home games, or a collection of ‘hard’ home games with ‘easy’ away games?
Does hosting the World Cup leave a legacy?
Countries usual bid to host major sporting events on two premises: 1) that the event will boost the economy and 2) that it will leave a sporting legacy.
The first premise is not supported by any reputable research; in the case of the World Cup, FIFA tends to gobble up most of the tournament’s benefits. But what of leaving a legacy? In the case of football, do national teams get better after hosting a World Cup?
The Premier League is sleepwalking into a PR nightmare.
By the 2017-18 season, the self-styled ‘best league in the world’ could have just three teams playing in the Champions League.
This is based upon a very simple projection of performance in UEFA competitions for the coming seasons. A more favourable, but still simple projection has the Premier League losing its spot a season later.
For the last few years, the Champions League quarter final draw has kept apart the competition’s biggest names, helping set up a series of remarkable semi final lineups.
The 2014-15 draw – and subsequent progression of Barcelona, Real Madrid, Bayern Munich and Juventus – was no different. Indeed, the first three teams on the list have stepped up another level in the last 9 months, creating a clear gulf between themselves and the remaining teams in Europe.
This got 5 Added Minutes asking – is this the greatest Champions League semi final line up in history?
Four years in football analytics
Four years ago this week, sitting on the third floor of my university’s library, I launched 5 Added Minutes. For a couple of months, the blog was simply a place to express frustrations at media clichés and received wisdom in football, but it quickly evolved into a medium for me to use data and analytics to challenge the conversations that were taking place in press conferences, ‘expert’ columns and television analyses.
I wasn’t the first to join this ‘revolution’ – not my word, but Simon Kuper’s in a June 2011 Financial Times piece; one of the first mainstream articles to take a view on the impact of statistics on professional football – and since 2011 there have been many more who have taken an interest, and even a lead, in the development of football analytics. But when a WordPress notification reminded me that it had been four years since the creation of my blog, I felt obliged to reflect on the journey of both amateurs and professionals in this industry. How far have we come, and has some of the promise of the Kuper article materialised into results?
Read more…
The Ballon D’or numbers game: Messi vs Ronaldo Part II
In the previous post, we established that there is a distinct Europe-Americas divide when it comes to Ronaldo-Messi preferences, according to Ballon D’or voting choices.
This is also noticeable when breaking down the voting by voter type – captains, coaches and media, below:
The Ballon D’or numbers game: Messi vs Ronaldo Part I
5 Added Minutes doesn’t care too much for Messi vs Ronaldo debates, but it does care for data and insights into behaviour, of which the Ballon D’or voting system provides lots of. Each country has three voters – the national captain, national coach and member of the media – who provide three votes worth 5, 3 and 1 point towards the best player in the world that year.
In the four awards since 2011 (held in January 2012 to celebrate the achievements of the previous year), Messi and Ronaldo have shared 60% of the points on offer – from a maximum possible of 89% – with Messi edging out his rival with 32% of the points.
But in this era of shared dominance, which countries have preferred the Argentine? And which have opted against him? The voting patterns of three individuals may not reflect the views of an entire country, but they provide a curious and sometimes amusing insight into certain national preferences:
No football fan ever believes the referee is on their side. Most, however, will accept that officials are subconsciously swayed by home support; indeed the authors of Scorecasting believe almost all of home field advantage can be explained by involuntary refereeing biases.
But are some Premier League referees more susceptible to these biases than others?
5 Added Minutes 