🏏 What can Americans learn about cricket from the T20 World Cup?

My Week in Sport(s): short-format cricket in the USA, Iga Świątek and Caitlin Clark

Welcome to My Week in Sport(s) — a regular newsletter from Plot the Ball.

In this edition:

• 🏏 The unpredictability of T20 cricket

• 🎾 Iga Świątek, dominating again on clay

• 🏀 Caitlin Clark’s decisive passing

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🏏 What can Americans learn about cricket from the T20 World Cup?

The steady worldwide sprawl of many modern professional sports is no longer a novel phenomenon in 2024 — but there are still occasional juxtapositions that make you realise how markedly many things have changed in the last couple of decades.

This week, for instance, it was an odd experience to travel to New York for work and witness one of international cricket’s flagship tournaments commence on American soil.

And that was only compounded by sharing my flight home with numerous New York Mets fans, over in the UK to support their team in the latest instalment of Major League Baseball’s London Series this weekend.

The fact that the USA is one of the co-hosts of this year’s Men’s T20 World Cup is not primarily driven by a desire to convert baseball fans to cricket.

As Cameron Ponsonby put it in a recent piece for ESPNCricinfo:

“There is genuine passion and interest in the game here…For cricket websites and broadcasters, the USA ranks high in terms of eyeballs because of the 4.5-million-strong South Asian diaspora that lives here.”

But T20 — with its technical focus on ‘hitting’ over ‘batting’ — will definitely be more legible to those American audiences not already familiar with cricket than the sport’s other more sedate formats.

What could an uninitiated observer look to learn about cricket from this tournament, then?

T20 is still a relatively immature format¹, but it didn’t take long for observers to grasp that a shortened contest meant greater variability of outcomes than was present in more traditional limited-overs cricket — where teams compete against one another for 100 overs in total, rather than T20’s 40.

A quick way to see this is to look simply at the outcomes of the men’s World Cups in each of the white-ball formats.

Since 2007, eight men’s T20 World Cups have been held — and they’ve been won by six different nations. The last eight editions of the men’s ‘one-day-international’ (ODI) World Cup, in contrast, have been shared by just four teams.

Australia, remarkably, have won five of the last eight ODI World Cups themselves, while no men’s team has won more than two T20 world titles.

The results of knockout tournaments can be misleading, though; a better way to compare the variability of each format is to look at each nation’s entire competitive record.

In a shorter, more volatile game, we would expect teams’ win rates to converge as chance plays a greater role in deciding outcomes.

But it’s not as simple as comparing each team’s overall win percentage between formats — as fixture scheduling in international cricket is imbalanced, to say the least.

10 countries have been full members of the International Cricket Council (ICC) for the entirety of the period that T20 cricket has been played internationally, and some pairs of teams have competed against one another much more frequently than others.

New Zealand have played 42 T20 Internationals (T20Is) against Pakistan over this period, for instance, but only 15 against South Africa.

A similar issue arises in ODIs: England have played 76 times against Australia, but only 33 against the West Indies.

These quirks of scheduling will flow through into teams’ overall win rates in each format.

Countries whose boards schedule matches more frequently against less skilled opponents will have a higher win percentage than if they had played a more balanced schedule, and vice versa.

Instead, let’s take pairs of these top countries who have played each other frequently and compare their head-to-head records in both formats.

From examining the distribution of those records, we should be able to compare the inherent variability of the T20Is compared to ODIs.

There are 21 pairs of countries who have played at least 20 T20Is and 20 ODIs against one another since 2005.

As a quick illustration: highlighted on the chart below are the records of the West Indies against England and of South Africa against Australia in each format over this period.

Broaden out our view to every one of these 21 match-ups, and the greater variability of international T20 cricket is clear: head-to-head win rates in T20Is are much more tightly distributed than in ODIs since 2005, where the longer duration means that skill plays a greater — and chance a lesser — role.

Among this cohort, only four teams have won at least two thirds of their men’s T20Is against another individual nation² — and the highest head-to-head win rate recorded by any team is 68%.

In ODIs, in contrast, eight head-to-head contests have seen one side win at least two thirds of the time — with three nations winning their matches against an opponent in this format as often as three quarters of the time³.

American sports fans who have been paying attention this week might have already had an inkling that this is the case, though.

The host nation’s historic⁴ win over Pakistan — former world champions in the format — has been the story of the tournament so far.

It’s true that some of the warnings which accompanied taking the World Cup into new territory have come to pass. Ticket sales at the games hosted in the United States have been mixed, and issues with the quality of pitches have impacted gameplay in New York too.

But an early upset victory for the hosts has made a significant pay-off on the ICC’s gamble much more likely — and that upset victory was more likely in this format of cricket than in any other.

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🎾 Run the Numbers

Before the 2024 French Open began, ESPN staff writer Bill Connelly placed Iga Świątek in a tier above every other contender — in either the men’s or women’s draw — for a singles title at Roland Garros:

Swiatek will turn 23 in a week, just as [Rafael] Nadal turned 23 during the 2009 French Open. If Swiatek wins the title at Roland Garros in two weeks, here's how she will stack up against the greatest clay-courter of all time:

French Open titles at 23: Nadal 4, Swiatek 4
French Open record: Nadal 31-1, Swiatek 35-2
Titles at three next biggest clay-court tournaments⁵: Nadal 9, Swiatek 6
Career win percentage on clay: Swiatek 0.879, Nadal 0.875

Only Jasmine Paolini — who ranked 20th in Tennis Abstract’s WTA Elo ratings at the start of the tournament — now stands between the Polish star and that fourth title.

Świątek herself entered the French Open at her all-time peak in the website’s rankings, with an Elo rating more than 100 points higher than second-ranked player Elena Rybakina.

The website’s operator, Jeff Sackmann, contextualises these ratings by providing a rough guide for how the difference between two players translates into win probability when they go head to head:

A 100-point difference in Elo ratings implies that the favorite has a 64% chance of winning; 200 points implies 76%, 300 points implies 85%, 400 points implies 91%, and 500 points implies 95%.

Whether you take the all-surface or clay-specific Elo ratings maintained by Tennis Abstract, the website’s model implies that Paolini has just a one-in-10 chance of defeating Świątek in today’s final — and stopping her from matching Roland Garros legend Nadal.

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🏀 Watch the Games

Caitlin Clark’s (relatively⁶) difficult start to life as a pro has continued since we last checked in during the first week of the WNBA’s regular season.

Even in her weakest outings, though, there have been moments where — as she puts it herself — "the Iowa Caitlin came out".

I was able to watch Clark and the Indiana Fever in action at Barclays Center last Sunday, in their comprehensive 36-point loss to the New York Liberty. The rookie guard left the game early with a minor injury, and was successful with only one of her 10 field-goal attempts.

Early in the second quarter, however, she demonstrated how valuable her playmaking can be⁷ even when her own shots aren’t falling.

Clark begins the play in the right corner as a teammate brings the ball up, but quickly gets some separation from her defender and makes her way to the top of the three-point line.

She immediately receives a pass facing her own basket — but, within a couple of seconds, the ball is out of her hands again.

Kelsey Mitchell — stationed in the opposite corner to start the sequence — creates an open lane for herself with a convincing feint towards the three-point line, and Clark quickly finds her cutting teammate with a decisive pass for an uncontested lay-up.

You can watch a clip of this sequence here.

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The next edition of My Week in Sport(s) will be published on Saturday June 15th.

1. It was only introduced for the first time in England in 2003.

2. England vs. Pakistan (66.7%); India vs. Sri Lanka (67.9%); Bangladesh vs. Zimbabwe; and Australia vs. South Africa (68%).

3. Australia vs. Pakistan (79.5%); South Africa vs. West Indies (80%); and Australia vs. West Indies (82.1%).

4. The USA did also beat Bangladesh — like Pakistan, a Full Member — in a three-match T20I series immediately before the World Cup began.

5. Connelly: “I'm counting these as Monte Carlo, Rome and Madrid on the men's tour and Rome, Madrid and Stuttgart on the women's.“

6. She was still named WNBA Rookie of the Month: “Among all players in May, Clark was tied for first in the WNBA with Diana Taurasi in 3-point field goals made, second in assists (59) and tied for second in free throws made. Clark became the third player in WNBA history, joining Candace Parker and Sabrina Ionescu, with 100+ points, 30+ rebounds and 30+ assists in her first six career games.”

7.

Neil Paine

’s recent stats-based ranking of rookies for ESPN — which placed Clark sixth so far — highlighted this aspect of her game: “Clark has the creation part down, for herself…and others (her assist rate of 34.1% ranks sixth), and that's not counting the passes her teammates failed to convert.”