Only criticism was boring and tiresome final chapters on the IPL and PSL as these chapters will date very quickly, provide little insight to take away with for future thinking and sort of filler stories. It was split into longer form cricket and T20, although the authors made a convincing case that they are very different in terms of approach and risk-taking.

Leamon and Jones start off this marriage of data and story with a demonstration of their field's contribution in England's fairytale transition from the outdated also rans to heralds of a new era in limited overs cricket - a journey that culminated in them being crowned champions at that final at Lord's in July 2019. It has come far too late to have any impact on the way I play the game of course, but it will alter the way I watch it and, more importantly, the judgments I come to about what I see. How left handed openers have benefitted from DRS for example wasn't something that ever would have occurred to me.

The overwhelming impression you get at the end of this is that this remains a science in its infancy, and there’s scope for lots more of this sort of thing. However post-Covid, there has been changes how the cricket is played, Joe Root is reverse scooping in a Test Cricket and BazBall has arrived.

There are some lovely insights from data on how cricket has changed and yet how orthodoxies have remained.For those brought up with the mantra that when a captain wins the toss he should either decide to bat immediately, or alternatively think about inserting and having done so then choose to bat, that is another part of the game that is deconstructed and then put back together again after the changing trends over time have been examined.

An example looks at the importance, or not, of bowlers maintaining a good length as opposed to a full length. It raises one particular issue I'd never previously considered but which is obvious once pointed out.

I'm a mild cricket fan, which is probably the minimum entry level for access to the book, but anyone who reaches that level will love the book, and for real cricket fans it qualifies as a must-read. There are charts and graphs and, as others have mentioned, some of these don't really enlighten me very much but one needs them in a book of this type. In addition the numbers that accompany the chapter on the apparent bias of most home umpiring decisions before the introduction of neutral officials are illuminating, if not surprising, as are the conclusions about DRS. For a book that claims to be heavy on statistical analysis, it doesn’t give anything like enough weight to probability or take enough account of the counterfactual. Filled with anecdotes from some figures who have been at the forefront of the data-related changes in cricket in the past decade and that's when the reading gets lively.

This looked at wider trends on basic aspects of cricket, like the mode of dismissal over time in Test cricket, to deeper stats like average by small pitch area. It's focus is on using economics-style quantitative analysis to explain trends and developments in modern cricket. I can only assume this was an attempt at taking readers through ideas step-by-step, but it leads to pages and pages of unnecessary visuals that break up the flow of the writing. As a sport fan, it was incredibly insightful to see how data and technologies have and are being used in cricket to discover past trends about the game.Leading cricket thinkers Nathan Leamon and Ben Jones lift the lid on international cricket and explain its hidden workings and dynamics - the forces that shape cricket and, in turn, the cricketers who play it. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. The answers to these questions lie in issues as diverse as pitch speeds, the LBW rule, neutral umpires, Hawkeye and DRS. I was intrigued by this book as it covered aspects of cricket that I hadn’t considered before and revealed stats that you wouldn’t expect. It was co-written by a statistician on the England cricket team named Nathan Leamon, who'd previously written what I think is the best fictional work I've read about sport, 'The Test: A Novel', a book so good that even my cricket-loathing wife enjoyed it.