Lure of T20 franchise leagues is greater than ever in the time of Covid-19 with coaches like Trent Woodhill leading the wayJust after eight o’clock on Thursday night, with the Hobart sky powder blue above the lights, umpire Paul Wilson began to whirl his right arm in the familiar PowerPlay gesture, before abruptly switching to three full rotations of his left, stern-faced but still jaunty, like a policeman forced to dance at the Notting Hill carnival.In that moment history was made. This was cricket’s first Power Surge. Related: Jofra Archer and Ben Stokes rested for England's Test tour of Sri Lanka Related: Big Bash League 2020 season opener: Hobart Hurricanes beat Sydney Sixers – as it happened Continue reading...
When you look closely at the ritual, it begins to seem odd that cricket lets blind luck and ‘dynamical bias’ play such a large partWhen he was 14, Persi Diaconis packed a fresh deck of cards and a spare pair of socks into a knapsack and ran away from home to become a magician’s assistant. He spent the next few years as an apprentice with Dai Vernon, whose sleight of hand was so smart, so sharp, he even beat Harry Houdini, who famously claimed he could pick any magic trick on the third go, until Vernon fooled him seven times in a row.They used to call Vernon “the Professor”, and now they do Diaconis, too. Because that is what he...
Australia’s Big Bash has been a success as the people behind it realised the vast numbers not watching cricket outweighed the fusty concerns of those who wereWhen Cricket Australia first hired Dan Migala, he hardly knew a bat from a badminton racket. Migala is a baseball nut from Chicago, “the equivalent of the cricket fan who keeps score with a pencil and quotes statistics from a century ago”. And he’s also chief innovation officer at the sports marketing firm Property Consulting Group. When Cricket Australia first started work on the Big Bash League, Migala was the man they brought in to plan the marketing strategy. He had a hand in almost every last little part of it, the colour of...