{"id":18150,"date":"2017-10-20T17:59:00","date_gmt":"2017-10-20T16:59:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jbvip365.com\/?p=18150"},"modified":"2017-10-20T18:03:06","modified_gmt":"2017-10-20T17:03:06","slug":"from-classical-to-pop","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jbvip365.com\/from-classical-to-pop\/","title":{"rendered":"From Classical to Pop"},"content":{"rendered":"

Rating the Test teams<\/i>
\nThe first cricket piece I ever published concerned my efforts to derive the Test team ratings from 1877-onwards. The ratings currently used by Reliance\/ICC were developed by David Kendix in 2003, so I had thought it would be interesting to calculate the ratings back to the first Test for two reasons; first, general interest – it would be worth doing if only to see how great teams of the past (the 1902 Aussies, 1948 Invincibles, 1969 South Africans, 1980s West Indies) fared in the ratings as compared to teams such as the 2004 Aussies who fell within the ratings era, and secondly I had a plan to use the ratings to derive individual player<\/i> ratings down the line. That first feature with Test team ratings was originally posted by the good people at howstat.com however this is no longer available on their site, so it can be found here<\/a>, while the individual player ratings (christened “Series Points”) can be found in a series of articles originally posted on CW, but which are mostly collected together here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Some years later, I moved away from Series Points as a way to rate players as that rating was based on performance in the series as a whole, rather than in actual matches, preferring instead to find the actual match impact<\/a>, but in any case the historical ratings have proved useful in helping to rate players time and time again, as it enables taking into account the strength of the opponent faced. <\/p>\n

As regards the Test team ratings I did actually suggest a revision to how they are derived in an effort to have them also take into account success away from home, as well as the degree of dominance, and that effort at “improving” the ratings can be found here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Moving on to ODI ratings<\/i>
\nWhat I’m going to do now is to develop impact ratings for individual ODI performance which will complement the Test player impact ratings, and the first step to achieving that is to find the historical ODI team ratings. Accordingly, this first feature looks at the 1970s. Hopefully arriving at ODI player impact ratings won’t take eight years, as the Test ratings did.<\/p>\n

From classical to pop – the development of ODIs<\/i>
\nCricket in the 1960s was very different from the game we know today. There was basically Test matches and domestic championship cricket, and that was it – no one-day competitions, no T20; there had been for a long time the Gentlemen vs Players fixtures in England (actually since 1806) but the distinction between amateur and professional was formally abolished in 1962. There had been a number of attempts to make the game more attractive, including a committee formed near the end of the war in 1944 and led by Sir Stanley Jackson, which talked in grandiose terms about attacking play and a dynamic attitude to the game, though offered no real solutions for either and indeed rejected limited overs cricket and Sunday play; the Findlay report of 1937 had also warned against too much cricket. Proposals for restrictions on play in the county championship left open the possibility of a knockout competition, which got the press very excited, however nothing came of it.<\/p>\n

Gentlemen and Players<\/I>
\nAs regards the distinction between Gentlemen and Players, this was increasingly becoming a grey area, with the appointment of Len Hutton as England skipper, the comments in Jim Laker\u2019s outspoken biography, as well as the admission that amateurs like Ted Dexter were financially doing quite well from the game. Even though the MCC were trying to keep amateurs in high profile within the game at the end of the fifties, even stalwart Yorkshire had by 1960 appointed a professional, Vic Wilson, as captain. There had been talk about compensating amateurs for \u2018broken time\u2019, although in 1958 Raman Subba Row was the first amateur to be censured for this.<\/p>\n

As far as the match itself, a combination of dwindling attendances from a high of over 20,000, a change in the social mores, and the recognition of the lack of a distinction between amateurs and professionals in terms of their attitude to playing, meant that the fixture, standardized as two matches a year at Lord\u2019s and Scarborough, was by 1962 of only passing interest. The MCC added some spice to the 1962 Lord\u2019s fixture by using it as the forum to announce the team and captain for the forthcoming Ashes tour, but the Gentlemen not having won in the past 18 fixtures it was decided to up stumps and call it a day.<\/p>\n

One Day Cricket Begins<\/I>
\nThe following year the Gillette Cup was launched, being the world’s first knock-out competition competed for by first-class teams. In the 1964 edition of Wisden<\/i>, while commenting on the success of the tournament, editor Norman Preston noted that there had been calls for a knock-out competition for some years. However, a review of Preston’s editor notes from 1959-on shows no reference to this by him in Wisden<\/i>, at least – in 1960, he noted that English cricket had “thrived again” during the previous summer, though in the following edition he bemoaned the falling attendance at county cricket matches (down almost 60% from the heady days of 1947), and also mentioned an MCC Committee which had been formed to look at the structure of cricket. In fact, in that same 1964 edition where he had applauded the success of the Gillette Cup, he also referenced a competition launched by the Daily Express<\/I>, the Better Cricket Competition in which readers were asked to make their suggestions to improve cricket; some of these were indeed prescient, such as bonus points for faster run rates, Sunday cricket, restricted first innings, immediate admission of overseas stars to the counties, limitations on bowler run-ups and minimum over rates – clearly the spectators knew what they wanted and the game needed, even if the authorities didn’t.<\/p>\n

In any case, it’s fair to say that the introduction of one-day cricket was not widely celebrated by the traditionalists. The title of this feature is a reference to comments in the 1974 Wisden<\/i> by Gordon Ross in his piece entitled “Cricket’s Strongest Wind of Change”, in which he sniffily stated <\/p>\n

“this type of cricket has become a family occasion; it is certainly not a connoisseur’s day. On this basis you would expect large crowds just as a Festival of Popular Music would considerably exceed a Mozart concert in attendance though the aesthetic qualities of the two types of performance would differ immeasurably in the mind’s eye of a genuine musician.<\/i>” <\/p>\n

In 1983, Wisden<\/i> published an Anthology of the years 1963-1982, however editor Benny Green stated that he had included only as much one-day cricket that, in his opinion, merited inclusion, i.e. “not much”. This, despite his opening prologue including the words <\/p>\n

“After all, argued the sophists, almost all the cricket ever played in this world has been one day cricket. Clubs everywhere have been contrasting one day cricket happily enough for centuries without ever blemishing the game or their own relish for it.”<\/I><\/p>\n

Nevertheless, Green exhibits a little too much glee that the first ever one-day match between first-class teams, the Gillette Cup match between Lancashire and Leicestershire, was rather ironically spread over two days due to rain.<\/p>\n