Tag: sports

Kneel down

When Colin Kaepernick knelt down during the national anthem, it was cool, and a strong sign of protest against racial violence in the United States. When other athletes, in the US and elsewhere decided to copy him (and did so on their own volition), it was cool as well.

What I find not so convincing is that after the Floyd murder earlier this year, sports organisations across the world decided to institutionalise the kneel down. When the English Premier League restarted after the covid-19 induced break, it was decided that all players and referees would kneel for a minute at kickoff.

Now it seems like it has been decided that the gesture will continue for the 2020-21 season as well – players and officials will take a knee for a minute at the beginning of each game. Of course, it has also been decided to make it “non-mandatory” – players who choose not to not join the protest will be free not to kneel.

The problem with the institutionalisation of the protest is that the protest loses its information content. Prior to the institutionalisation in June, if a player knelt, he/she was making a statement that he/she believed that “black lives matter”. Now that kneeling has become standard practice, there is no way for a player to convey this information.

Alternatively, it is possible now for a player to send out the opposite information (that he/she doesn’t believe in this protest) by refusing to join the protest. However, given the PR repercussions of such a move, it is unlikely that any player is going to take that stance (no pun intended).

Actually – by institutionalising the kneel, the protest level is getting changed, from individual players to leagues. I can see why the protest is going to be continued – it will be a continuing statement by the sporting leagues that they believe in the cause. However, individual players will not have the opportunity to show their protest (or dissent) any more.

I also wonder if and when this protocol is reversed, since it takes effort for some team or league to “bell the cat”. Even saying that “this is mere symbolism” is bound to attract wrath of protestors elsewhere, so teams are all caught in a Nash equilibrium where they continue to kneel down in protest.

And the longer this kneeling down protest continues, the more the meaning that it will lose. Rather than serving to make a statement, it will end up as yet another ritual.

TV Bundling

This is yet another blogpost to expand on a tweet I wrote yesterday.

Just to remind you, Suprio Guha Thakurta (former Chief Strategy Officer at The Economist) and I have started The Paper, a 4-days a week newsletter that goes in (some) depth into one business story from India each day. We rely purely on “secondary reporting” (collating from news items), to which we add our own commentary.

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Last week we wrote about a new TRAI order about bundling of TV channels. Essentially the telecom (and broadcast) regulator in India has gone to great lengths to ensure that TV channels don’t get bundled in a way that makes it difficult for the customer to choose.

While the effect of this bundling order might be uncertain, one question needs to be asked to TRAI – why are they only concerned about bundling at one level (across channels) and not at the television channel level itself?

After all, television channels are also bundles.

For a fixed fee a month (and a willingness to see a certain proportion of paid content), subscription to a television channel gives you the opportunity to watch any of the programming that the channel offers. Let’s take a sports channel, for example (IMHO, live sports is the only reason you need cable TV. Everything else can be streamed).

Let’s say there is one Sony channel that offers live coverage of UEFA Champions League, NBA and cricket played in England (I know all these are part of the Sony bouquet, though I don’t know if they are regularly broadcast on the same or different channels here. Let’s assume there is one channel that shows all three).

Assume that I’m only interested in the football, but not in either NBA or cricket played in England. In order to watch my football, I’m forced to buy subscription to the entire TV channel (and thus pay for the cricket and basketball as well). Why am I being forced to do this?

Take any channel, and the outcome is going to be similar. You will subscribe to the channel only because you want to watch a few programs, but you are forced to pay for everything. Is this fair?

Let’s move beyond televisions. Consider the Times of India. I’m mainly interested in the local news and the bridge column (OK, my daughter has taken a liking for the cartoon page as well). Still I need to pay for the whole paper. Is that fair?

Essentially, bundling exists everywhere. And it is going to be incredibly hard to regulate it away. TRAI wants to reduce one kind of bundling (across channels), but its regulation seems  blind to in-channel bundling. Essentially it is impossible to regulate against in-channel bundling as well.

And in any case, there are clear benefits to customers from bundling, the most important of which is the elimination of “mental cost”. If some day I suddenly want to watch NBA, it’s already there on the Sony channel I’ve paid for, and I don’t need to rush that moment to try and buy subscription.

Yes, pay per view exists in certain markets, and it can be profitably offered for certain kinds of premium events whose viewership is so uncorrelated with viewership of other events that bundling is nigh impossible.

Also, isn’t your spouse or partner also a bundle? To quote Esther Perel:

Today, we turn to one person to provide what an entire village once did: a sense of grounding, meaning, and continuity. At the same time, we expect our committed relationships to be romantic as well as emotionally and sexually fulfilling. Is it any wonder that so many relationships crumble under the weight of it all?

I leave you with her TED TAlk.

 

Vlogging!

The first seed was sown in my head by Harish “the Psycho” J, who told me a few months back that nobody reads blogs any more, and I should start making “analytics videos” to increase my reach and hopefully hit a new kind of audience with my work.

While the idea was great, I wasn’t sure for a long time what videos I could make. After all, I’m not the most technical guy around, and I had no patience for making videos on “how to use regression” and stuff like that. I needed a topic that would be both potentially catchy and something where I could add value. So the idea remained an idea.

For the last four or five years, my most common lunchtime activity has been to watch chess videos. I subscribe to the Youtube channels of Daniel King and Agadmator, and most days when I eat lunch alone at home are spent watching their analyses of games. Usually this routine gets disrupted on Fridays when the wife works from home (she positively hates these videos), but one Friday a couple of months back I decided to ignore her anyway and watch the videos (she was in her room working).

She had come out to serve herself to another serving of whatever she had made that day and saw me watching the videos. And suddenly asked me why I couldn’t make such videos as well. She has seen me work over the last seven years to build what I think is a fairly cool cricket visualisation, and said that I should use it to make little videos analysing cricket matches.

And since then my constant “background process” has been to prepare for these videos. Earlier, Stephen Rushe of Cricsheet used to unfailingly upload ball by ball data of all cricket matches as soon as they were done. However, two years back he went into “maintenance mode” and has stopped updating the data. And so I needed a method to get data as well.

Here, I must acknowledge the contributions of Joe Harris of White Ball Analytics, who not only showed me the APIs to get ball by ball data of cricket matches, but also gave very helpful inputs on how to make the visualisation more intuitive, and palatable to the normal cricket fan who hasn’t seen such a thing before. Joe has his own win probability model based on ball by ball data, which I think is possibly superior to mine in a lot of scenarios (my model does badly in high-scoring run chases), though I’ve continued to use my own model.

So finally the data is ready, and I have a much improved visualisation to what I had during the IPL last year, and I’ve created what I think is a nice app using the Shiny package that you can check out for yourself here. This covers all T20 international games, and you can use the app to see the “story of each game”.

And this is where the vlogging comes in – in order to explain how the model works and how to use it, I’ve created a short video. You can watch it here:

While I still have a long way to go in terms of my delivery, you can see that the video has come out rather well. There are no sync issues, and you see my face also in one corner. This was possible due to my school friend Sunil Kowlgi‘s Outklip app. It’s a pretty easy to use Chrome app, and the videos are immediately available on the platform. There is quick YouTube integration as well, for you to upload them.

And this is not a one time effort – going forward I’ll be making videos of limited overs games analysing them using my app, and posting them on my Youtube channel (or maybe I’ll make a new channel for these videos. I’ll keep you updated). I hope to become a regular Vlogger!

So in the meantime, watch the above video. And give my app a spin. Soon I’ll be releasing versions covering One Day Internationals and franchise T20s as well.

 

Sehwag versus Tendulkar

Though he hasn’t formally retired yet, given that he is hopelessly out of form, one can probably conclude that Virender Sehwag is unlikely to play for India again, and hence it is time to pay tribute.

I have developed a little visualization where I plot the trajectories of a batsman’s innings based on his past records. There are basically two plots – in the first, I track the expected number of runs he would have scored as a function of the number of balls he has faced. In the second, I plot the probability of the batsman still batting as a function of the number of balls faced.

I’ve created an interactive visualization using the Shiny Server plugin for R, on a little Digital Ocean server that I’ve leased. In this application, you can compare the innings trajectories of different players in different formats. I have taken my raw ball by ball data for this application from cricsheet and have analyzed and visualized the data using R.

Having built this “app”, I was playing around with random combinations of players and formats, and soon started comparing Sachin Tendulkar with Virender Sehwag. Medium-timers like me might remember that back when Sehwag started out in the early 2000s, he was called “the clone” for his batting style was extremely similar to that of Sachin Tendulkar. That they are both short and chubby also helped fuel this comparison. One thing that sets Sehwag apart, though, is his sheer pace of scoring, especially in Test matches.

So while playing around with the “app”, when I loaded Sehwag and Tendulkar together, I noticed one interesting thing – Sehwag in Test matches plays exactly like how Tendulkar plays in ODIs, and Sehwag in ODIs plays like Tendulkar does in T20s (data includes IPL  games). Check out the graphs for yourselves!

srtvssehwag1

srtvssehwag2

 

I’m not sure how much load my small server can take so I’m not putting the link to the app here. However, if you think you’ll find this interesting and will want to play with it, write to me and I’ll send you the link.