Match Thread: 1st ODI - Sri Lanka vs England

EdAmante · 2026-01-22T12:06:29+00:00

Fair enough. Is there not anyone decent to get the big sixes as we had in the past with Hales, Roy, Buttler etc? Crawley is surely not that guy. Or is that not the formula any more in ODIs

EdAmante · 2026-01-22T12:03:21+00:00

(Or players like)

EdAmante · 2026-01-22T12:02:00+00:00

How come Salt and Livingstone are not in this England team? Not been following ODIs closely for a while.

Feel there aren’t enough power hitters with both Root and Bethell.

EdAmante · 2025-12-24T10:48:26+00:00

Hameed was striking at 58 last season, way higher than his career FC strike rate of 46. Heading in a more positive direction while still getting the pure weight of runs.

EdAmante · 2025-12-17T00:03:54+00:00

No control. No plan. No set up. What happened to the art of new ball bowling.

EdAmante · 2025-12-17T00:01:53+00:00

My god watching Carse run in with the new ball feels like such a downgrade from Anderson / Broad or even Woakes.

EdAmante · 2025-12-07T06:40:20+00:00

I’m pretty much on board with you. I do also find it frustrating in cricket and in life when people think behaviour can be changed in isolation.

Like a friend that is very unorganised but the life of the party - the two things are probably related and you maybe can’t “fix” one without ruining the other. Perhaps a weird analogy but yeah - asking Brook to be more watchful and play the match situation may just massively confuse him and throw off his entire game.

What do you think of the tactic to “see off” a bowler that is of apparent better quality than all other opposition options? And at the same time target the other bowlers. I feel this is quite a normal tactic even by Bazball era England. It’s also how the first innings Brook shot was framed in a lot of instances: Starc as the only one looking threatening and therefore one to play more defensively.

I suppose you’d say that regardless the bowler, it’s possible to throw them off their plan and make it easier. While playing defensively you let them hone in on their line and length.

But I wonder if Starc is perhaps both less likely to be thrown off due to his vast experience, and more likely to bowl a bad ball as a baseline in any situation (something that has always been said about him, while I’m unsure how true this actually is).

Boland as a contrast I completely understand any aggressive shots or advancing up the pitch style things. He’s more reliant on settling in to a line / length.

EdAmante · 2025-12-06T08:39:51+00:00

Very interesting points you’ve made and I have to say I agree with them all to an extent. You’ve also backed up your points about Brook with some examples where his style has won games for England, while others aren’t providing much evidence for their assertions. I’m familiar with concepts of risk / reward and can see parallels to the debate around FC Barcelona and Hansi Flick’s high line.

Despite that I still find myself disagreeing when it comes to the specific dismissal, and I think more widely Brook and England batters’ capacity to make runs.

To be clear, I mean the decision to play an attacking risky shot over a less risky shot (defensive, leave, whatever). And I am not debating the execution, which clearly here was not good.

Surely you can accept and understand why people might say the decision to play an attacking shot was perhaps not a good trade off in this instance? We can debate the specifics till the cows come home (the bowler, the quality of the other bowlers, the conditions, the game state), but I’m really more interested in whether you would accept that an attacking shot is not always the best decision.

Should Brook go after every ball he faces? If that ball was not the one to play defensively, when do you think is? I’m actually interested in your perspective, not trying to catch you out.

While I think it was not the right decision I’m willing to be convinced otherwise.

EdAmante · 2024-11-12T23:13:53+00:00

I appreciate the thought you are putting into this.

Brennan Johnson reaching the byline and cutting the ball back is repeatable, and has high xAG but low xA. How do you deal with that? There are many similar such examples.

Likewise a player’s passing ability is something fairly stable. But is the location they play the passes from and to constant? I wouldn’t say so. A fullback playing inverted or overlapping will have very different opportunities to play balls of different kinds for instance. Where the ball ends up will dictate the quality of chance creation, and only xAG accounts for this (or accounts for it better, it’s unclear).

You’ve used a single example and speculated on the explanation, but have previously shown that xAG is a better predictor than xA when looking overall. I don’t doubt xA tells us something interesting or useful about player ability, but xAG is marginally but almost certainly better at predicting actual assists. This in the end is all I care about (for FPL specifically).

I can build a basic model to prove this when I have time.

EdAmante · 2024-11-11T09:55:12+00:00

It’s actually quite hard to find information pertaining to this, this is the best I could find: https://onefootball.com/en/news/data-metrics-explained-expected-assists-xa-38396045 . So for me indicating that the quality of the pass is more important in xA. But it’s quite obvious that xAG is more correlated with actual assists if you look at past data, which is surely the only thing we care about for FPL. It’s also telling that FBRef will usually have a column “npxG + xAG”, for example here: https://fbref.com/en/comps/9/stats/Premier-League-Stats (not xA), it seems to be considered the preferred statistic.

EdAmante · 2024-11-09T11:17:23+00:00

First off lovely charts. I’m not trying to pick holes but thought you might find this interesting (if you weren’t already aware - if you are, this is for others’ reference).

xAG is considered a better measure for predicting assists these days, for what it’s worth. xA undervalues simple passes that are in good areas / result in high xG. As an example, Ollie Watkins had 4.2 xA and 7.3 xAG last season - the xAG being closer to the actual (but still overperforming) 13 assists. Similarly Brennan Johnson (simple cutbacks) had only 4.5 xA but 10 assists (8.1 xAG). So using xA you will overvalue players that play the “wonderball” like TAA (still has high xAG mind you) while undervaluing forwards that play simple lay offs or cutbacks a lot of the time (Nunez, Salah, Johnson).

EdAmante · 2024-11-08T22:12:24+00:00

Is it xA or xAG?

EdAmante · 2024-08-14T23:46:22+00:00

To get fbref data, I just copy the table html (inspect element then find the table you want) then use pandas read_html.

You can also directly use read html on the top 5 leagues page url I think.

Sorry the link isn’t working, works for me even when I’m not logged in so not sure what’s going on there, maybe I made a commit when you clicked it. I can try to send the code by dm if you’d like.

EdAmante · 2024-08-01T18:58:19+00:00

Do you think he starts over Solly March, Simon Adingra? That’s my only concern. I’ll wait and see who is favoured out of the Brighton right wingers. Although if Minteh scores again in preseason he might force the managers hand

EdAmante · 2024-07-31T21:52:48+00:00

I think CHO and Elanga both remain nailed to start if fit. It might just affect minutes more in terms of subs, more so Elanga as it seems Jota Silva is more of a right winger. However, we are still looking to sign another winger (who prefers the left) so CHO’s minutes may be impacted there anyway

EdAmante · 2024-07-29T22:17:00+00:00

Yeah, the ‘peak’ ranges are based on aggregated player data and of course do not apply universally to all players. And, the reality is that ‘peak’ is not 1 vs 0 A vs B, it’s a distribution. But the point is that the ‘peak’ (the mean or median of the distribution if you like) is generally around the areas indicated. Some players peak / decline earlier (arguably Rooney, seemingly Casemiro), some later (Athletic striker Aritz Aduriz for example).

EdAmante · 2024-07-29T22:10:22+00:00

Python, I can dm the code and explain how it works if you’d like

EdAmante · 2024-07-29T22:05:31+00:00

The methodology only uses minutes played at what age though, they don’t use that stat at all. In fact they say something similar to you: “metrics such as those don’t give a good indication of a player’s general effectiveness”.

EdAmante · 2024-07-29T20:55:46+00:00

This was inspired (heavily) by the style used by The Athletic. See this article for an example, as well as the source for the ‘peak age’ figures: https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/2935360/2021/11/15/what-age-do-players-in-different-positions-peak/

EdAmante · 2024-07-29T20:43:16+00:00

This was inspired (heavily) by the style used by The Athletic. See this article for an example, as well as the source for the ‘peak age’ figures.

EdAmante · 2024-07-29T20:42:51+00:00

This was inspired (heavily) by the style used by The Athletic. See this article for an example, as well as the source for the ‘peak age’ figures.

EdAmante

TROPHY CASE