Small change but big Impact

Summary: The importance of 1s (Singles)

When it comes to sports, I believe in data vs. emotional views. It is hard as I have a lot of opinions on "What I think is the right thing to do," and that generally misses the big picture; that is why I rely more on data for practical outcomes.

So this past weekend, I started looking into why we are losing games when we shouldn't. Well, there are several factors we can all point to; generally, there is no one thing that causes you to lose a total of 40 overs of the match; it is a combination of things such as dropped catches, bad ground fielding, bad shot selection, running b/w the wickets, etc. So how do we make the most impact by not having or expecting to make significant changes? So I began to look at what that could be and quickly nailed it down to two things - # dropped catches, Taking more Singles (1s). I concluded that taking singles is a much easier target or low-hanging fruit and should impact our winning rates with very little adjustment. We can go for more glory for hitting additional 6s, but that can only work for a few games, at best 20%. On the other hand, taking more catches requires a major uplevel on our skills and may not be a realistic short-term goal.

Let's dig deeper to see how I came to this conclusion. 1. # dropped catches, which has plagued our team for a while. The question I ask the team is, what have we done to improve our catching capabilities? Are we ignorant and want to continue that path? Or let's put it this way which of the good teams with good records drop these many catches? If we haven't done anything to fix it, shall we keep complaining about it? More importantly, why blame Captian and Vice-Captain? The bottom line is that improving fielding is individual responsibility; yes, the Captains, Vice-Captain, and Management have an important role in creating that environment. Looking at just HPTL Fall'21 data, we have 1 player among the top 10 non-wk catches. Avengers 3, Falcons 2, Masters 2, RCC 2 indicate that these teams are grabbing higher catching dismissals. SSCL last season data is below, indicating the same as above; Royals' top 3 fielders ranked 80,89 & 100. You can pick up any season, and it's going to be similar.

Therefore, based on this data, we can conclude that we are well below avg. fielding side. We can't rely on our fielding to win games until we level it up, perhaps qualifying this for a "significant change". So what else can we do to win more games? 2. Taking More Singles and keep ticking the score Let's look at the 1s/singles we are taking compared to the oppositions that were not very young, considering the average age gap between the two teams. We are taking approx. 40-50% less 1s than not-so-difficult opponents. Also, we are not compensating for 1s in boundaries either; actually, we are scoring less or equal there. Not suggesting that we need to change our attacking game as it seems to be at par or may need a little improvement.

So what if we closed that gap by even 25%? We would have won both games as we would have had fewer dot balls plus not carry the psychological pressure burden. In the FCC game, we had 10 out of 18 overs where we scored less than 4 runs taking to a total of 13 runs in those 10 overs, whereas FCC had only 3 overs below 3 runs which helped them to keep momentum throughout their innings even when we bowled well, they kept the score ticking. We need to ask ourselves if it's really hard to take singles? Is it harder than taking catches? Going with our team's skill level, taking more singles is more achievable than expecting more catches.