One of Malcolm Gladwell’s findings in his book “Outliers” was the disproportional distribution of birthdays of the players in professional sports teams. For example, if the cut-off date for selection at the youth level was January 1st, you would see more players who were born in the first few months of the year than the last month. The reason being that younger players were more likely to be weeded out as, all things considered, they are less strong than the older players in their age group.

Left-arm Chinaman looks at the English and Australian teams and finds:

The cut-off for Cricket Australia is also on the 1st September, but there seems to be a noticeable effect here. Indeed, more than a fifth of the entire squad were born in the month of October, with a half being born in the last quarter of the year.

So, clearly, Australia discriminates, whereas England doesn’t. According to Gladwell we would therefore expect “double” the amount of elite level cricketers in England, compared to Australia. The Pommies should crush the pommies [sic, ed: Aussies] at every meeting.

This determination does not hold water. First, the number of data points is very low. We would need to look at a bigger data set, such as the number of cricketers playing in first-class cricket. The selection of the international team has many asterisks to it, including the team’s strategy, unexpected form (good or bad) of players, injuries, playing conditions, etc. which may not provide an accurate reflection on the skill of the players.

Second, it does not follow that the best players in England will necessarily beat a second-tier team from Australia. If the overall skill level in Australian cricket is higher, then their selection process may weed out the best players, but still be sufficient to beat other countries.

It is odd that Left-arm Chinaman says that there is a “let’s all have a jolly good time” approach to English cricket even though it has a cut-off date just like Australia. Which means that England has the same discrimination as Australia. So essentially the data means nothing. The simple answer is that the English cricketers are not as talented and capable as the Australians.

Is this so hard?

[Photo licensed from shashiBellamKonda]