NICK FRIEND: When Southern Vipers and Northern Diamonds meet, both sides will be flanked by young analysts: Vipers’ George McNiel and Diamonds’ Harrison Allen – their presence a reminder of the direction in which women's domestic cricket is traveling
When Heather Knight spoke about the inaugural Rachael Heyhoe Flint Trophy during a press conference ahead of England’s series against West Indies, she made a point of singling out the quality – and availability – of the live streaming service that accompanied the new competition.
For the women’s domestic game, it has represented an important addition – not just in providing access to followers across an exceptional summer, but also in the increased professionalisation of its product on the back of the ECB’s £20m investment and subsequent overhaul of the domestic structure.
For Knight, it meant that for the first time she has been able to turn her eye to a raft of players and improve her first-hand knowledge of young prospects who might one day find themselves in an England squad alongside her. Now, she will know where they score their runs and how they take their wickets – rather than simply how many and for whom.
On Sunday, Southern Vipers and Northern Diamonds will meet at Edgbaston in the final, with both sides flanked by young analysts: Vipers’ George McNiel and Diamonds’ Harrison Allen.
The pair know each other well, having followed on from one another as interns at Sussex, where they learned from Luke Dunning, the club’s head analyst, while still students at university.
McNiel, 21, and Allen, 22, will fly under the radar once the occasion kicks off, quietly going about their coding, watching each delivery with an eagle eye and inputting the data of every ball into their software, all with a friendly rivalry hovering in the background.
From the start of the bowler’s run-up, everything is recorded: where the ball pitched, the height at which the ball passes the stumps, the shot played – whether off front or back foot, the runs scored. That data finds its way onto an online platform, complete with graphs and video packages, to be viewed and downloaded for the players’ use.
More than most other elements, the presence of McNiel and Allen at Edgbaston will best highlight the advances made around the domestic women’s circuit. Whatever the level, conversations about opposition sides have always taken place. But in English domestic women’s cricket, with the exception of the Kia Super League and certain counties, those discussions have rarely come with such detail.
Georgia Adams is the highest run-scorer in the Rachael Heyhoe Flint Trophy, with 270 more runs to her name than any Northern Diamonds player
“There are quite a few players in our squad who had never really experienced any analysis,” Allen tells The Cricketer. “So, they’ve never had coding, or their games filmed, and they’re completely new to it. It’s quite interesting to see what they come up with – they’re just really grateful to even have the footage.”
Allen worked with Yorkshire Diamonds in last year’s Kia Super League, where players benefited from analysis. But in the main, this year has marked a major step-up, offering a more scientific, professional approach for players across the board.
“I think everyone has had to adapt and learn – even me,” explains McNiel, who worked with Southern Vipers’ Regional Development Centre last winter but is experiencing his first full summer in women’s cricket.
“I’ve learnt a lot about how to put the analysis across. I think it’s something as we move on in the future that will be massive. Because players won’t have seen as much analysis, they have to get used to using the tool and how they can use it on the field.
“Analysis isn’t the be-all-and-end-all. It’s not a 100 per cent thing where you can say: ‘Player X – she does this.’ It has to be a tool that you use to help you rather than relying solely on the data. I think that’s been the biggest thing for the players to adapt to.
“Before the games, we will run through each player and I’ll present them what the data suggests on each player and any differences in what I see.
“We can then formulate plans from that. The game doesn’t always reflect on the data, so it’s a matter of working out what is correct data to use and what isn’t, which is one of the big processes to overcome.”
One player, who was first exposed to data analysis during a single year in the KSL and also featured in the Rachael Heyhoe Flint Trophy, told The Cricketer of the complexities involved in initially getting to grips with it and knowing how much of the swathes of information provided to commit to memory, while retaining faith in a long-developed skillset.
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Speaking to The Cricketer, a coach in this year’s competition stressed the importance – for the players’ sake – of teams working out quickly the difference between useful and excess data. By way of example, he was most interested in a beehive provided by his analyst showing the percentage of balls from his bowlers that would have hit the stumps over the course of an innings.
Previously, because of the paucity of domestic women’s cricket either televised or streamed – not to mention an amateur setup, proper data-driven analysis was often impossible within the county game; sample sizes were either too small or non-existent entirely.
And while the Rachael Heyhoe Flint Trophy only comprised a six-game group stage, analysts have been able to work their magic because every delivery of the competition has been captured on camera.
“That’s one of the biggest issues we’ve had to overcome,” suggests McNiel, who will return to the University of Portsmouth next week to complete the final year of an undergraduate degree in sport and exercise science, before continuing in his role next summer, where he will also work with Southern Brave in The Hundred.
“But as the tournament has gone on and we’ve had all the footage, you can see the stat packs have got more and more detailed because as we’ve got more detail, we’ve got more data.
“Next year and in years to come when there is a rich data pool, I think the actual analysis of data we get from that is going to be really good and beneficial to move the game forward.
“Two or three years down the line, that’s the exciting thing. When they’ve played a lot of cricket and it’s all been filmed and analysed, the feedback we can give is endless really. When I worked with Sussex in the men’s Blast last year, the amount of data you can provide is huge.
“They could have batted 40 times, so there is so much insight to give. Whereas, they’ve only been dismissed four or five times in this competition. It’s an exciting place, where the game is moving forward to.”
Jenny Gunn has proven to be an experienced head in Northern Diamonds' side
Allen uses Tableau, a business intelligence software, to create dashboards and visually understandable sheets for his players to study.
“On one sheet, you’d have one batsman and all their numbers, and then a few graphs to compare different bowler-types for match-ups,” he explains.
“So, when I go to Hollie Armitage, she can look at it and go: ‘Right, so she has a lower strike rate against leg-spin. When she comes in, we can bowl leg-spin to her straight away.’”
Armitage, Northern Diamonds’ captain, and head coach Danni Hazell have been vital for Allen, just as Vipers skipper Georgia Adams and head coach Charlotte Edwards have proven for McNiel.
Their buy-in has given important validation to their work, offering the necessary encouragement to younger squad members to make the most of new expertise.
“They’re both really on board with the stats and that’s been really helpful,” says McNiel. “Having that relationship with the captain has been massive.”
Allen adds: “Danni got really into it and she challenged me to come up with new things, which has been really good. You just need that one moment. I always try to claim wickets and stuff like that. I’ll say: ‘That’s a wicket for analysis’ just to keep reminding myself of what we’ve managed to do.”
He recalls his initial arrival at Yorkshire Diamonds, where Hazell was previously head coach, fresh from shadowing Dunning at Sussex. He walked into a squad featuring Lauren Winfield, Alyssa Healy and Jemimah Rodrigues, all stars of the international game.
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“They bought into it straight away,” he says. “It helped in the first game last year when we played Surrey Stars, I think it was Lizelle Lee and Bryony Smith opening. I looked at their numbers against leg-spin and thought we should try Helen Fenby in the powerplay. She got them both out. Stuff like that helps.”
Jenny Gunn, too. Thirty-four years of age and now retired from international cricket as a veteran of 259 England appearances, she could have been forgiven for being a data-sceptic, wondering perhaps how she might possibly benefit in the twilight years of her career. But instead, her willingness has helped to set the tone.
“It helps when they buy into it,” Allen adds. “When they’re keen to do the analysis and keen to watch the videos, the young players follow.”
It helps as well that the women’s game exists on a constant upward curve, with data analysis just the next natural addition for a sport continuing to evolve and catch up infrastructurally with its men’s equivalent.
“I think the players see it,” Allen says. “It’s all over the place at the moment: CricViz are doing a terrific job of promoting analysis. You see that and you see it actually work quite often.
“The players are really open to ideas. Not a lot of them have had it before, having someone there like me or George, who are there just to do that. To have it as a proper position, it elevates the standard and makes it so much better.”
And as this shortened campaign has progressed, he has seen an encouraging development in the requests being asked of him.
With little evidence on which to provide data at the beginning of the summer, the majority of his early work was based around putting together video packages of opposition batsmen and bowlers to give his charges an idea of what they could expect to face, especially in the cases of opponents against whom they had never previously played.
As the tournament has continued, however, players have started to ask more questions, requesting clips of certain spells or dismissals.
“When you get that kind of engagement, you know that they’re getting on board with it,” Allen adds. “It’s really good when they come to you; you feel like they’re taking it on. I’m not there to catch anyone out or find anyone’s weakness and say we should drop them. I’m there to help them.”
As head coach, Charlotte Edwards played an important role for McNiel by buying into his data
The next stage of his plan is to join systems together: he wants to see the performance data connected to Diamonds’ strength and conditioning data and, likewise, to their physiotherapy data. It is all part of the grand plan for a bona fide, elite institution.
“It’s not just me being there as an analyst,” he says. “It’s having Danni as a head coach full-time, having Courtney Winfield-Hill as talent manager, James Carr as manager. We have Sarah and Isaac doing video and strength and conditioning.
“All that put together gives you that professional setup, which is similar to what you’d get at any level in the men’s game. I think it has been brilliant for people to see that and for the players to benefit from it.”
As for this weekend, however, Allen and McNiel are rivals – two youngsters in front of their laptops going toe-to-toe in the background, more than satisfied with the knowledge they have been able to impart and the direction they see the domestic women’s game taking. Between them, their teams lost just one of twelve games in the round-robin phase.
Allen’s next task is straightforward: “After the last game, Danni came to me and said: ‘Right, now you need a plan to get Georgia Adams out,’” he explains, enjoying the trust placed on his shoulders. The Vipers captain has been the standout batsman in the competition by a considerable distance; remarkably, she has scored 270 more runs than any Diamonds player.
Once Sunday passes, though, he is keen to catch up with McNiel, his successor on Sussex’s internship programme, for a worthwhile chinwag. Like with any competition, there is plenty of mutual respect beneath the surface.
“I really want to get on Zoom and show each other what we’ve done this year,” Allen says. “This year especially, we’ve seen so many young players talking to opposition players and learning off them. It’s the exact same thing with analysis – with people who you look up to.
“It will be really interesting to know if we’ve come up with the same sorts of things – say, because we’re playing at Edgbaston, have we come up the same thoughts on what it’s like as a ground? What are his thoughts on his players? What are our thoughts on our players?
“I’m sure all the teams have had analysts in, but you never really know what they’ve been doing. But knowing George and what he will have done, it’s a really good advert for analysis in general that we’re both in the final.”
Come the evening, one will have played a key, understated role in clinching a trophy. But both will have shone the light on a segment of the future in domestic women’s cricket – as great a symbol as any in the move towards professionalisation.
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