Selectors have been in the news of late, which may not be ideal. Indeed, they should neither be seen nor heard; Or maybe just seen in matches so we know they’re doing their job.
Australia came to India for the current series with injured players unlikely to play the first few Tests, and India have already retained the Border-Gavaskar Trophy. Meanwhile, India are wondering what to do with the talented and in-form Shubman Gill or the really talented and out-of-form KL Rahul.
And then there is the failure of Chetan Sharma. The chairman of the selection committee has resigned following his comments on senior players. It was stupid, whatever trickery was used to get him to lower his guard and shut his mouth. Can someone with such poor judgment get selected for the national team?
Cricket literature is rich in the specific crafts of the game: batting, bowling, captaincy, wicket-keeping. It’s not so good in one important aspect: team selection. This is the reason why former England selector Ed Smith Decision Making: Putting the Human Back in the Machine A welcome addition to the library. Some of it is plain common sense, as Smith quoted a football club director as saying, “You need to recognize talent that whispers, not just talent that screams.”
Some of this comes from Smith’s three years as England selector and his philosophy of selection. Smith, a former England player still in his forties, has written some of the more interesting books on the game; His references here range widely, from the philosopher Emerson to the behavioral economist Daniel Kahneman.
maximize output
“The point of selection,” he says, “is to maximize the output of the whole, not to promote, employ, or select only ‘fit’ individuals.” Does this solve the Rahul vs Gill problem? It may or may not, but it practically tackles the question. This is the strength of the book – the questions are as important as the answers, especially when the answers are not written in stone; Nothing to do with human judgment or instinct.
Today there are statistics about every player, and if that’s all that matters, any computer can pick a team; Often selectors think that is enough to act as a publicizer of that data. But of course the data needs interpretation, and that’s where the selector comes in and needs to kick in. As Smith says, “The usefulness of data depends on the strength, not the weakness, of the human dimension.”
Selectors can be conservative (“If you always wait until you have sufficiently strong data, the moment of decision will be well passed). We often have to work with the twin challenge of incomplete information and real-time pressure .” ) or fanatics, running into players very quickly. Both systems have substantial successes and failures.
Five months after making his first-class debut for Karnataka, Anil Kumble was playing for India. He was 19 years old, and there may not be a whole lot of information about him. Nevertheless he took over a thousand first-class wickets, 619 of them in Tests. The selectors will also have to hold back their instincts, and pick players based on performance as much as possible. And don’t be shy about opting for an unconventional look. It is a point that Smith pointed out from his experience that “the more conventional the team selection, the less England win.”
When ideas don’t work, they stick in everyone’s memory. But when they are successful, they become self-evident. It is the fate of the selector.
‘processes’
Selectors are fond of talking about “processes”, as are captains. “For every good process, you also need a good anti-process,” says Smith, recounting how a typical selection meeting in his time played out. It was important to be disruptive (in ideas, that is), original and imaginative. “If you were the only decision maker, what decision would you make?” He liked to ask to provoke such a reaction.
There is often a “bureaucratic inertia” that prompts selectors to take the beaten path, play it safe, and start with compromise in mind.
Smith’s system is not perfect, and he makes no claim to be so. But it is an approach to selection that increases the chances of identifying and eliminating such inertia. Smith’s left-field substitutes (Jos Buttler, Adil Rashid, Sam Curran) didn’t appear out of thin air. How those selections came about is told in the readable, informative, detailed style that is associated with Ed Smith’s writing.