This is how to transform cricket in South Africa

What South Africa’s first match against Zimbabwe in this year’s Cricket World Cup made abundantly clear, is that Zimbabwe’s national cricket team is much more representative of their country’s demography. Not one ethnically black (or ‘African black’) player was in South Africa’s starting eleven; our country’s demography (roughly: 80% ethnically black, 9% Coloured, 9% white and 2% Asian/other) is nearly the exact opposite of our national team demography (in the last Test match: 9% black, 18% Coloured, 64% white and 9% Asian/other). That is disappointing after two decades of democracy.

But it’s not as if there’s many black players clamoring for selection: Aaron Phangiso is the only ethnically black player in the group, and he will find it difficult to replace our incumbent spinner, Imran Tahir, who has become an ODI wonderkid. The pipeline is also pretty empty: I don’t know whether Kagiso Rabada, a right-arm fast bowler that destroyed Australia in the semi-final of the u/19 World Cup last year and ended the tournament as the highest South African wicket taker, will be a star Protea bowler one day. All I know is that he has the potential to be a star, which is why the national selectors thought it wise to select him for the national T20 side, only to be smashed by Australia. Let’s hope he learns, hopefully with his self-belief and confidence intact, and that he isn’t pushed too hard too fast.

Unfortunately, Kagiso is the exception rather than the rule. Since the democratic transition in 1994, very few ethnically black players have played in the Test side; Makhaya Ntini being the only one that could keep his place for an extended period of time. Of course, this is not a problem unique to cricket; the current Springbok side is as white as what it was in 1995 when it won the World Cup for the first time. But cricket’s failure to grow ethnically black talent seems to be particularly acute.

No one is disputing the fact that we need more black players to be selected for the Proteas. I think it is fair to say that Makhaya Ntini was a favourite not only among black fans; he was a favourite to all because he was entertaining and hard-working and brilliant. Yet no more Ntini’s have come through the system. I’ve written before on why that is. To summarize: cricket is expensive, in terms of time and resources. It is incredibly difficult for a young kid from an impoverished background to have access to good coaching, facilities and family support that will allow him to compete on a level playing field against richer kids. In South Africa, the poorest 80% of the population is almost entirely black. And because cricket skills are developed from a young age, black kids in poor schools simply cannot compete against their wealthier white compatriots. It is also why, if you really want to change the system, you have to start in school.

Which is exactly the opposite approach Cricket South Africa has taken. Last year, the University Sport South Africa (USSA) Cricket Week enforced quotas for different race groups. Each team had to field 3 ‘players of colour’, one of which had to be ethnically black. Teams struggled to fill the quota, some having to field only 9 players because they could not meet the quota requirements. In 2015, the quotas will increase to 4 players of colour, 2 ethnically black. In 2016, it will be 6 players of colour, three ethnically black. It is impossible to see, given current trends, how most universities will be able to adhere to these requirements without 1) putting players without the required ability at risk of injury and 2) without discouraging good players from playing cricket.

Quotas are useful when there is evidence of racism: if there are enough black players that can be selected but coaches or managers choose to ignore them. Such racism is irrational because coaches are supposed to pick the best players to win the tournament, and if they discriminate against black players then they hurt their own chances of success. In such an environment, quotas would force racist coaches to pick the black players instead of the inferior white players.

I doubt that this is what is happening at universities, though. In my discussions with university managers and players, they spend an inordinate amount of time scouting for black talent. The few black players that are available are headhunted by all universities, with promises of bursaries and free tuition. And in some cases, the really good ones, like my Masters student and former Stellenbosch captain, Omphile Ramela, are drafted to the provincial side, where quotas also mean that those coaches are frantically looking for even more promising black players.

Let me phrase this in terms of economics. Racial quotas shift the demand curve for black players, but does nothing about the supply side. The only way you shift the supply side, as any first year Economics student should know, is by improving technology and thus productivity. So the standard response to ‘how do we get more black kids in sport’ is not ‘force teams to play them’ but ‘build better facilities in schools’.

Yet we are clearly not building better facilities in schools, or providing better coaching, or, at least, we are not doing it fast enough. And yet, politicians and, in most cases, fans (myself included) want to see faster progress. A different answer is clearly needed.

So, Cricket South Africa, here is my suggestion: allow the private market to develop black talent. Economists know that the best way to ensure a steady supply of any good is to get the incentives right. And to get the incentives right, in this case, would require some financial support. Instead of a quota at the USSA Cricket Week, allow teams to pick any player they want to. But for every ethnically black player they field, pay them R500 000 (or R100 000 per match). For every Coloured player, pay them R250 000 (or R50 000 per match). If all teams pick only black players, Cricket South Africa would need a maximum budget of R50 million to stage the tournament. Do this every year for at least 10 years. (To ensure that universities play to win, give an additional R5 million in prize money.)

What is likely to happen? University coaches will react to these incentives swiftly. They will realise that it can be incredibly lucrative to field a team with several black players. They can therefore plan to invest their future earnings today; spend the next two years finding black players, nurturing and developing them (an expensive exercise), offer them bursaries (even more expensive), and fielding them in three years’ time. Intermediaries – good development coaches with an eye for talent – will realise that if they invest in black young kids with potential, universities will be willing and able to buy these players from them: expect the creation of numerous (profitable) cricket academies around the country that will improve access for black kids to better facilities and better coaching.  The result is that a much larger pool of black talent will emerge, allowing provinces to pick and choose and the national team to prosper.

R500 million over a ten year period is a lot of money. But I suspect not more than R200 million will be needed, as good white players will still be selected (especially if there is a financial reward for winning). If the government (perhaps with the help of sponsors) are serious about transformation in sport, they need to put their money where their mouth is. And because much of the money will go into bursaries, this type of spending has large positive externalities too.

Quotas, although easy to enforce, won’t solve the shortage of professional black cricketers. If we want to produce a Makhaya Ntini or Kagiso Rabada every year, a well-funded system that gets the incentives right is the only viable alternative.

On the Proteas, globalisation and a formula for winning trophies

Tsotsobe and De Villiers celebrates the dismissal of Nasir Jamshed (c) AFP, Cricinfo

Watching the Proteas beat Pakistan last night, I found myself thinking about the irony of the spectacle. I’m not referring to the two suicidal run-outs by South African batsmen (where have we seen that before?; and in any case, that would be satire) or the way South Africa ‘choked’ Pakistan into submission. Instead, I was contemplating the long road cricket has traversed to this match, played by two former colonies of England, on English soil, with barely an Englishman in sight. Pakistan fielded a team of Pakistani origin, South Africa a team of diverse origin: six white South Africans (Ingram, Millar, McLaren, Morris and two Afrikaans-speaking, De Villiers and Du Plessis), two Coloured* South Africans (Duminy, Peterson), Hashim Amla whose grandparents hail from India and Tsotsobe and Phangiso who are black South Africans. More surprisingly, the crowd was predominantly of Pakistani origin, perhaps immigrant Pakistanis or first-generation Brits who still support their parents’ country-of-origin.

England is, of course, the home of cricket. Cricket began to be played in rural southern England in the sixteenth century, not far from Birmingham where the game was played last night. It traveled abroad with the soldiers and officers of the British empire, to the Caribbean, and South Africa, and India, and Australia and New Zealand, and many places in-between. But today, cricket is not an English game anymore; it is an Indian game accidentally invented by the English, as a famous quip goes. As Fahad Mustafa writes in a new paper in The Journal of Global History, “this represents a remarkable transformation: a game that was hardly played by the millions that inhabited the British colonial territories in South Asia in the mid-nineteenth century, less than a century later turned out to be the most popular sport in these erstwhile colonies, followed with a passion that is in stark contrast with the popularity of cricket in England”.

Why did cricket so easily transfer to colonial subjects? From the colonial masters view, cricket was, according to Arjun Appadurai, “seen as an ideal way to socialize natives into new modes of inter-group conduct and new standards of public behaviour”. Schools were established in the colonies to train the next generation of colonial administrators, and a diet of athleticism was supposed to transfer vigour and manliness to the ‘lazy native’. Especially in India, Pakistan and the Caribbean, “cricket’s role as an educating and civilizing device found many supporters in colonial administration”.

In South Africa, cricket took much longer to establish itself among the colonial subjects. Albert Grundlingh writes in The International Journal of the History of Sport about the slow take-up of cricket by Afrikaners (Afrikaans-speaking South Africans descended from early Dutch, German and French settlers). Even though an Afrikaner – NJH Theunissen – represented South Africa as a fast bowler against England in 1889 in Cape Town, Afrikaners did not take up cricket in large numbers. English colonial officials were also dismissive of Afrikaners’ ability to play the game:

Writing shortly after the devastating Anglo–Boer War of 1899–1902, John Buchan forcefully vented such views. ‘It is worth considering the Boer [Afrikaner] at sport’, he wrote, ‘for there he is at his worst. Without a tradition of a fair play, soured and harassed by want and disaster his sport became a matter of commerce (shooting game for profit)’. Afrikaners to him ‘were simply not a sporting race’… (Grundlingh 2011: 99).

For much of the early twentieth century, then, cricket in South Africa was the domain of English-speaking white South Africans. Only after 1948, when the Afrikaner-backed National Party gained power, did things change.

In language reminiscent of current black demands that sporting teams should reflect the composition of the ‘nation’, it was argued in 1956 in Afrikaner circles that ‘until the Afrikaner takes his place on our cricket fields no Springbok team can be said to be truly representative of our country’s cricketing ability’ (p. 102).

How was this to be achieved?

This quest was not formulated in terms of present-day transformational charters, but a different route was suggested. Emerging Afrikaner interest had to be channeled into the ‘establishment of Afrikaans clubs, or rather clubs where the atmosphere is Afrikaans so that the newcomer will readily feel at home and will be able to concentrate all his endeavours on the mastery of the game itself’ (p. 102).

Was this strategy successful?

Although some predominantly Afrikaner clubs were formed, in a broader context Afrikaner interest in the game benefited from socio-economic and attendant cultural changes which permeated white society during the 1960s. With an average growth rate of 6% during most of the decade, South Africa experienced a period of unprecedented prosperity. In tandem with this there was a trend among Afrikaners away from unskilled or semi-skilled, relatively poorly paid, labour to skilled and better remunerated positions with stable career prospects in the burgeoning nationalist bureaucracy and other associated enterprises (p. 102).

The rapid economic growth of the 1960s, especially of Afrikaner incomes, created the opportunity for many young Afrikaners to attend better schools, with better facilities, and to learn the game from a young age. By 1992 (note: thirty years later), when South Africa returned to international cricket in a test match against the West Indies in Barbados, five of the eleven players were Afrikaans-speaking.

Even though 80% of South Africans are black, few black cricketers have played for South Africa at international level. Cricket remains an expensive sport, which is the reason some commentators, including Makhaya Ntini, has suggested that it is easier for black South Africans to become bowlers than batsmen, as the demands on expensive gear is less stringent.

As with many problems permeating South Africa, the solution (from our own history) seems to be higher economic growth. If we manage to grow South Africans’ incomes, expect more black batsmen to emerge and prosper. Not only will we see a transformed team, but, hopefully, also a Cup or two in the trophy cabinet.

* Coloured South Africans are descendants of liaisons between Europeans, slaves from Malaysia, Indonesia, India, Madagascar and Mozambique, and indigenous Khoesan.

Lessons from apartheid

Discussing the legacies of apartheid: Andile Khumalo, Lumkile Mondi, Johan Fourie and Bheki Mngomezulu (moderator) Photo: Reinhardt Germishuijs

On Friday, I joined Andile Khumalo and Lumkile Mondi as panellist during the ERSA workshop on the Economics of Apartheid (held from 20-22 March in the Slave Lodge Hall in Cape Town). Our topic: Solutions to the legacies of apartheid. Each panellist had 10 minutes to state his case. Here is my introduction:

It is impossible to think about a set of policies that will, within a short space of time, eradicate the apartheid legacies of poverty, unemployment and inequality. I say this because history provides an excellent guide: the poor white problem, already fervently discussed in policy circles during the 1910s (as Lindie discussed this morning), only really ‘disappeared’ from policy discussions during the 1960s (even though, as Edward John Bottomley shows, it still persists). Even though the poor white problem was about a third as severe as black poverty today, it required 40 years of 5% annual economic growth for it to be ‘eradicated’. Perhaps a more contemporaneous example is more appropriate: Hans Rosling tweeted earlier this week that Africa will need 5% annual growth for the next 50 years to reach the same living standards that Europeans currently have.

The point is: we have to be patient. But this is not to say that we cannot do anything.

The first priority is that we have to know, to interrogate, have far we have come and how much has changed. Collecting long-run wage series by race and occupation, as Martine called for on Wednesday, is important if we are to understand the divergence of interracial inequality (how unequal were white and black wages at the start of the 20th century?), its persistence, and its convergence (since the 1970s). But we also need within-group wage series: as has been suggested at this workshop, there is no such thing as an homogeneous experience for black South Africans during apartheid. The inequality of black incomes during the twentieth century is still badly understood. Such within- and between-group disaggregated wage data can then begin to inform our models of economic development.

A second priority, and one that has been highlighted throughout the workshop, is to separate the racial prejudices and ideologies of apartheid from evaluating its economic policies, programmes and institutions, many of which still persist today. As Nicoli mentioned, it is perhaps only now, nearly 20 years after apartheid, that we can begin to acknowledge that not all apartheid policies were detrimental to development. Lumkile and Ganief mentioned that the IDC was an important pillar of industrial development from the 1940s and continues that role today. Servaas mentioned yesterday that social transfer policies were already highly redistributive by 1994. While the motives may not have been benign, the outcomes were. Studying the apartheid period is therefore not only important for the way we understand and interpret our shared history, but it suggests that we can learn from its successes and mistakes.

Thirdly, then, this workshop (and earlier research) has begun to investigate these lessons, but much more needs to be done. Here I offer some suggestions.

• There is little doubt that the success of Afrikaner society to “pull themselves up by their bootstraps” can be attributed to the dramatic improvement in white education. Spending on white education already began after unification, but spending was only part of the story: Jan Smuts emphasised the improvement in teacher quality. Yesterday, Servaas mentioned the poor quality of South Africa’s teachers, specifically in math and science. Are there lessons to be learned from the large, state-sponsored roll-out of teacher education during the early twentieth century for today?
• In addition to the higher quality teacher, and something that has been given very little attention, is the important role of civil society in improving the white education system. Women’s leagues (notably the ACVV) and the Dutch Reformed Church, for example, not only provided facilities for rural schools, but also funded and managed school hostels and feeding programmes for poor rural kids. This was indeed a policy of ‘no child left behind’. It’s great to see Oprah and Patrice Motsepe investing in education, but can we draw on lessons from private spending in the twentieth century to improve education outcomes today?
• On Thursday, Dieter showed the massive spatial inequalities that persist, that the highest unemployment levels remain in the former homelands (even though the boundaries and barriers to migration have been removed). During the general discussion, culture was mentioned as a possible explanation; that people ‘have an affinity to the land’ or ‘treasure their roots’. Ironically, these same arguments were made by the first Carnegie commission into white poverty in 1932. Afrikaners were seen to value the land and therefore would not move to cities, remaining isolated and impoverished. But within a generation, better education and better job prospects meant that most Afrikaners were living in urban areas. Are cultural explanations for poverty really helpful?
• Edward argued that apartheid’s industrial decentralisation policies were ineffective in bringing manufacturing industries to the borders of the homelands, mostly because the focus was on outcomes other than financial viability. Will policy-makers’ current attempts to establish special economic zones, for upliftment and development purposes, learn from these apartheid spatial policy errors?
• Danelle discussed the complexities within the white labour movement of the 1970s. Is the same not happening within COSATU at the moment?
• Laurence collected data on agricultural inputs and outputs during the apartheid period, which allow economists to calculate whether the introduction of new technologies – like tractors or harvesters – were labour complementing technologies or labour-substituting technologies. (Tractors may have been labour-complementing while harvesters labour-substituting, but this is still just an hypothesis.) Such lessons may have important implications for the current episode of labour unrest and mechanisation on farms.
• There are certainly other lessons not discussed at this workshop: for example, what is the role of entrepreneurship and how is it cultivated? It is certainly not incidental that Anton Rupert rose to prominence during the 1940s and 1950s. What is the role of financing for entrepreneurial ventures? What support did Volkskas (literally, the people’s bank) play in connecting Afrikaner savings and investment? Where are the black savings institutions? What role did science and technology play during apartheid? Where are the black Hendrik van der Bijl’s, who founded Eskom, Iscor, the IDC and many more. What was the role of trade and regional integration during apartheid? South Africa is part of the oldest customs union in the world – SACU – which was founded in 1910. Why is this institution in decline? How is our integration into the rest of Africa so slow?

I guess if I have to find a way to summarise all of this, I will refer to something I know much more about: sport. A UCT geographer once told me the Parable of the World Cup, and I’d like to repeat it here. He asked me, just before the 2010 FIFA World Cup, what the best way is for a country to win the World Cup: is it to appoint an expensive Brazilian coach? Or is it to give every kid in South Africa a soccer ball to play with. I think apartheid is the story of how white, but specifically Afrikaner kids, were all given soccer balls. Playing fields were built and good coaches at the junior levels were appointed. Forty years later, whites in South Africa ‘won’ the proverbial World Cup, reaching levels of income as high as any country of the world. Of course, the story is not that simple: apartheid meant that sometimes the balls and fields of black kids were taken to the benefit of the white kids. Or they were simply excluded from team selection.

But the question today is this: how do we ensure that all South African kids get a soccer ball? Only then can we dream of an equal-opportunity and prosperous future.

Why WP Rugby should move to Cape Town stadium

There are many reasons why the Western Province and Stormers rugby teams could continue to play their rugby at Newlands, their home for more than a century. The three most frequently cited are that Newlands is the historic home of South African rugby, its walls draped in the old traditions of the game and the memories of rugby legends, great moments and fierce rivalries. The second is that a switch to the newly-built Cape Town stadium would be financial folly; Western Province Rugby already owns Newlands, while they would have to rent the facilities at Cape Town stadium from the City of Cape Town. And the third, why change something that’s not broken?

Proponents of the move often counter with reasons of their own: The facilities at the new stadium are far better for the players and for the fans. Newlands, tucked into a suburban neighbourhood, can be a traffic nightmare; in contrast, Cape Town stadium has rapid public transport connections to the central train station and is close to the large Waterfront with its ample (if expensive) parking. The capacity of the new stadium is also larger, the spectator experience much better and, the clincher, beer is allowed inside the stadium. Compared to Newlands, the player facilities are also world class. And to put it bluntly, Cape Town stadium is also much more impressive than Newlands (see picture) and represents the spirit of the new South Africa and the future of Cape Town.

So here’s why I think WP Rugby should move. First, tradition and history are important, but we should refrain from using it to arrest progress. Yankee Stadium, home of the New York Yankees since 1923 and arguably one of the most revered (and cherished) stadia in the United States, was closed in 2008 after the new Yankee stadium was built. The old stadium was demolished in 2010 and is now a city park called Heritage Field. Arsenal, one of England’s oldest football clubs, moved in 2006 from Highbury, where they had played since 1913, to the new Emirates stadium. It wasn’t that these clubs had not valued their history, but what they realised was that if they wanted to remain at the top of the game, so to speak, they had to move forward.

Second, and perhaps more importantly, there is the belief that, because Western Province Rugby owns Newlands, the financially sensible thing to do is to remain there. This line of argument, though, neglects to consider opportunity costs. Let’s say a conservative estimate of the value of Newlands is roughly R300 million. If Newlands were to be sold, Western Province Rugby could potentially earn up to R30 million annually from investing these funds. Such returns, I suspect, could easily pay for rent of the new stadium, given that all stadium maintenance costs and other related expenditures would now be removed from WP’s budget. (A side note: this requires the City of Cape Town to reconfigure the new stadium to ensure that WP Rugby can accommodate all their stakeholders, principally members and suit holders. This seems to be happening, as the new Business Plan for Cape Town Stadium suggests.) The point is: owning doesn’t imply that there are no costs; the foregone income may be much higher than the current benefits of ownership.

But I’m actually not in favour of selling Newlands completely, because I think there is value to be had from the current history and tradition. Yes, I am in favour of Stormers and WP games being played at the new Cape Town stadium and thus the money to do this must be found somewhere. So here’s my proposal: redevelop Newlands. Reduce the seat capacity to a maximum of 10000. Convert all of the current suites and upper levels into A-grade offices, conference facilities, hotel rooms and perhaps even condos. Continue to use the pitch for practice sessions. What Stormer supporter would not like to look from his office window and see the team practice for this weekends game? Why not remodel the Jan Pickard stand into the four-star Jan Pickard Hotel, where each room has a view of the field? Or, for those really avid supporters, let them buy a bachelor or two-bedroom apartment with a living room view onto the famous Newlands grass. Who wouldn’t want to wake up to an early captain’s run on a Friday morning?  The multi-use of stadia is becoming a global phenomenon: I’ve been to a shopping mall inside Benfica’s Stadium of Light, which housed not only a supermarket but several retail shops and cinemas.

A smaller Newlands will also allow WP Rugby to host other events like derby schools rugby or the final of the club championships, which usually doesn’t draw more than a few thousand. And if we are really inventive, why not build a permanent roof and use the stadium for temporary exhibitions, music concerts, or even other sport codes: imagine a ten-thousand seater sports arena for an ATP tennis tournament, or world-class gymnastics or boxing events.

Redevelop Newlands into something that will more than compensate WP Rugby for hiring Cape Town stadium for all Currie Cup, Super 15 and international rugby matches. More people, more fun, more beer, making more financial sense. At least for the next hundred years.

The Continents Cup

David and Goliath: Diminutive Snethemba Ngidi stood his man against the tall, strong Ghanaians

In the build-up to Euro 2012, a couple of friends and I recently attended an u/20 international football tournament in Cape Town. We watched two matches – South Africa vs Ghana and Nigeria vs Argentina. On display were some of the best future football talent: look out for future star Snethemba Ngidi, pictured, the diminutive South African central attacking midfielder currently signed at SuperSport United, who won plaudits – even from the Argentinian coach – for his distribution and attacking skills; he also seems to enjoy it. But, as the results over the last week have shown, an all too familiar trend for African countries appear: the African teams struggled to compete against their Latin American, European and Asian rivals, in this case Brazil, Argentina and Japan (there are no European countries participating in the tournament). An African country has never reached the semi-finals of the FIFA World Cup. It has never won the FIFA Confederations Cup. Only once in the eighteen times the event has been staged has an African country – Ghana in 2009, beating Brazil on penalties – won the u/20 FIFA World Cup.

What are the reasons for this poor performance? It’s not that Africa doesn’t produce exceptional football players. Didier Drogba’s exceptional performances for Chelsea, showcased in the final of the Champions League a few weeks ago, is a case in point. Income per capita is certainly important: at the  most basic level, it allows for better diets which reduces the stunting of children; at a broader level, it results in higher government revenues which pays for better schools, training facilities, coaches, administrative structures and high-performance centres. Some would argue that genetics is important: Southern Africans are generally shorter than West Africans. But then again, Zambia beat Ivory Coast in the final of the African Cup of Nations earlier this year. Also, Barcelona doesn’t seem to care too much about height. In fact, one could argue that the genetic diversities of African countries should actually act as an advantage in team selection.

I would argue that the small size of most African countries – the effects of low population density and haphazard colonial borders – is another important explanation for Africa’s inability to compete. We have exceptional footballers, but they are dispersed over the continent, and only once in a generation does one African country have a large pool of exceptional players at their disposal – perhaps Ivory Coast over the last few years. So here’s my suggestion: instead of having eight countries compete in the Confederations Cup, why not have six continental regions compete: Africa, South America, North and Central America, Northern Europe (including Russia), Southern Europe, and a combined team for Asia (South and East) and Oceania. An African team of Drogba, Gervinho, Yaya and Kolo Touré (Ivory Coast), Adebayor (Togo), Demba Ba (Senegal), André Ayew, Kevin-Prince Boatong and Michael Essien (Ghana), Steven Pienaar (South Africa), Seydou Keita (Mali), Samuel Eto’o and Alex Song (Cameroon), Adel Taarabt (Morocco) and Stéphane Sessègnon (Benin)  sounds devastating. (And just imagine Messi, Tevez, and Higuain (all Argentina), and Kaka, Hulk and Neymar (all Brazil) and perhaps Luiz Suarez (Uruguay) in the same line-up.) This will also give exposure to those brilliant players that originate from small countries that are unlikely to ever compete at the highest international stage (this is also true for players of small, European countries; imagine Christiano Ronaldo had been born in Bosnia and Herzegovina).

I’m pretty sure such a tournament will create immense excitement – and severe headaches for whomever has to coach the respective teams. It will also draw spectators from a broader pool of just the current participating countries. And who would not want to travel to see the best African players take on the best of Europe, Asia and America?

The Confederations Cup in its current format is dead. Bring on the Continents Cup!

Beginner’s luck

Sport has many applications to real life. We learn that life is sometimes unfair, that even our best is sometimes not good enough, or the commentator’s favourite cliché that determination is as important as preparation, athletic ability or creativity. But, at a broader level, sport can also inform our understanding of how humans behave, which has application to activities outside of the sporting world. Think of goal keepers’ decisions to choose which way to dive in a penalty (game theory), or the tests for racial discrimination in English football or the NBA.

A 2010 IMF working paper investigates one other aspect of sport – and life – that is too often neglected by economists: luck. The paper asks a simple question: is an international cricket player’s career adversely affected if his first series is played in a country outside of his home country. The authors argue that the bad luck of being first selected in an away-series, on average, leads to a less successful career than those cricketers who were selected for their countries and then played their first series at home.

This has important implications for labour markets in general, the authors aruge. Economists often find it tough to dissect the effect of luck in the job market, as it is often correlated with ability; people who work hard create their own luck, as Gary Player would have said. What this study shows is that luck (playing in either a home or away series, which has nothing to do with player ability) does not only impact a players performance during the first series, but also has an impact on his chances of being reselected (negatively, if he played his first series away from home) and on his career performance (measured as his batting average). Vernon Philander (pictured) is perhaps the best recent South African example. Many thought his initial success was down to beginner’s luck and that he would struggle on different pitches. Yet, he has reached 50 test wickets faster than any other South African bowler. These findings also suggest why it is better to keep Mark Boucher for the England series; the lesson here is don’t send your best new youngster to debut away from home in difficult and unfamiliar conditions.

Of course, the study is open to criticism. The data used is for all test cricketers between 1950 and 1985 (excluding South Africans because of isolation). That is before the professional era. Top cricketers are now readily exposed to different pitches and environments; just think about the emergence of the IPL where most of the best players play annually, and of the hectic international tour schedule. The best cricketers also play little domestic cricket, and international pitches have also improved to meet certain standards. Even so, captains and commentators often emphasise home ground advantage.

The best cricketers are arguably those who adapt best to new conditions. But allowing them to play their first series at home can improve their chances of success. Perhaps a large share of Vernon’s success is simply down to, well, the beginner’s luck of playing his first series in South Africa.