Have you ever accurately predicted what will happen on a cricket pitch before the ball has been bowled? It’s an incredible feeling. That moment when you glance at the field, remember who’s on strike and think: “Here comes the short ball,” only for it to arrive, be pulled and then safely pouched by the fielder you had mentally circled at deep square. For a split second you feel omniscient. Like you’ve cracked the code. Cricket, more than any other sport, invites this kind of clairvoyance. Its patterns are legible, its traps visible, its repetitions comforting.
Even the greats get a kick out of playing soothsayer. During the third Test of the recent Ashes, Ricky Ponting was calling the action for Channel 7 when Pat Cummins was at the crease getting ready to face Brydon Carse. “We saw Cummins last over get unsettled by one that angled back up into the left armpit,” Ponting said. “He’s not a great ducker of the ball, he tries to ride the bounce and that’s why I like this field. You got one back on the hook so you can’t play that, you got one waiting under the helmet at short leg.”
Like clockwork, Australia’s captain clipped a bouncer straight to Ollie Pope at short leg. Ponting, a man who achieved everything in the sport, leaned back with a self-satisfied smile. Social media did the rest: clips, plaudits, gifs, the familiar chorus about his genius and uncanny ability to see the game three balls ahead.
But there was a quieter truth sitting in plain sight. Ponting hadn’t set the ambush. Ben Stokes had. The field was already in place, the short ball already part of the plan. Ponting’s gift wasn’t prophecy so much as pattern recognition, an elite understanding of why a decision had been made, not ownership of the decision itself.
That distinction matters. Because modern cricket is increasingly a game of premeditated choices: tendencies logged and weaknesses stress-tested before the bowler starts his run-up. What looks like instinct is often preparation made invisible. We applaud the voice that calls it, not the hand that sets it, and, in doing so, we miss the more interesting story, about how captaincy now lives somewhere between gut feel and hard data.
To understand why moments such as Ponting’s feel so prophetic, it helps to understand the architecture beneath them. In modern cricket, foresight increasingly has a name: the matchup.
Ben Jones, a senior analyst with CricViz who has worked with franchise teams around the world, defines it simply. “A matchup is a good option to bowl to a certain batter, or a good option for a batter to face a certain bowler.” At heart, it’s about engineering advantage. “You’re trying to create a situation where a well-suited player from your side is up against a poorly suited player from the other side.”
The idea itself isn’t new. “Captains have always thought about who is a good bowler to bowl to this batter,” Jones says. “What’s changed is how you arrive at those matchups and how they are communicated.”
Where once this was intuition and experience, it is now increasingly the output of databases and models. Analysts can examine head-to-head history, release heights, speeds and swing types. That influence is no longer discreet. “The analyst used to be the nerd in the back of the box,” Jones says. Now analysts sit on auction tables, relay signals from dressing rooms and shape decisions in real time. “There’s a greater acceptance of data from players who’ve grown up in franchise cricket.”
Jones is quick to stress its limits. He recalls pushing hard for Phil Salt and Will Jacks to open for the Pretoria Capitals in the SA20, arguing Kusal Mendis’s numbers against pace and bounce made him a poor option. The head coach, Graham Ford, overruled him and Mendis, having worked on this weakness, tore the tournament apart.
That anecdote resonates with Adam Hollioake, the former England and Surrey captain who won three County Championships between 1999 and 2003, just before the data revolution. For him, the danger lies not in information itself, but in mistaking it for truth. “It’s a good servant, but a bad master,” Hollioake says.
He offers himself as an example. “You could look at the numbers and say I wasn’t very good against leg-spin because I got out to Shane Warne,” he says. “But if someone bowled poor leg-spin at me, I was very good at destroying it. Data can lie. You’ve got to be careful when you take it as gospel.”
Hollioake remembers captaincy as a craft built on conversation and memory rather than metrics. “It was about asking people their experience, drawing out information, and then the captain remembering and applying it at the right time.” In his view, the game has come full circle.
“Pre-1995, applied cricket knowledge was the be-all and end-all. Then analysis came in and whoever had it had a competitive advantage. Now everyone’s got an analyst. So the advantage comes back to who can apply the information best.”
Which is why moments such as Ponting’s resonate so strongly. They feel like prophecy, but they’re really recognition: the ability to read patterns, remember past events and understand why a field has been set. We may still applaud the voice that calls it, but the game itself is reminding us that insight has always been shared between numbers and nerves, between preparation and feel. Still, when it clicks, there’s no better feeling.
