Wakely’s boys prove there is always a way in land of T20
Their red-ball aspirations may be low, but in white-ball cricket, and T20, Northants are writing the blueprint for success
In sport and beyond, few concepts are as dispiriting as financial determinism: the notion that what is possible is determined by how much cash you have to start out with. This law is not perfect, but it holds pretty strong: in Soccernomics, authors show that there is a 90 per cent correlation between what a team spends on player salaries and what they achieve on the field.
All the more thrilling, then, when this law is violated, however fleetingly: hence the joy of Leicester City’s triumph in the Premier League last season, undimmed by their inevitable regression to the mean this term.
Thirty miles south of Leicester lies Northampton, who have given cricket its very own Leicester City story, only, in some respects, it is even more remarkable. For while Leicester’s brilliance was for one season only, Northamptonshire, belying a budget among the bottom five of the 18 counties, have built a dynasty, reaching three T20 Blast finals in four years and winning twice. It is all the more remarkable for coming against the backdrop of plans, now effectively formalised, to bring in a new elite T20 competition and so marginalise the Blast.
Northamptonshire have risen to pre-eminence in the domestic T20 game from a position of unrivalled hopelessness. Across 2011 and 2012, Northants won three T20 matches while losing 18, and were comfortably the worst T20 side in the land.
“We were embarrassing,” current captain Alex Wakely later said. “No-one wanted to come and watch us. Even our own supporters were laughing at us.”
No one is laughing now. Northants’ stunning success has been a triumph of meticulous planning and cannily prioritising their resources: a sign of what is possible for less wealthy counties.
First came acceptance. “Everyone was fed up with losing and being rubbish,” Wakely later said. In this atmosphere, no idea was too radical. Why cling on to anything, when it had all been failing so abjectly? Northants’ very hopelessness created the scope for David Ripley, who took over as head coach in July 2012, and the backroom team to transform how the club viewed T20 cricket.
Adapt Northants did. The most fundamental step the county took seems ludicrously simple: training more for T20, and taking it more seriously. “We all practised really hard at red-ball, but when it came to white-ball practice, everyone had to hit the ball as far as they could and have a slog, like in a club net,” Wakely said.
In place of this came training with a purpose. Until the winter of 2012, Northants spent about 80 per cent of their training preparing for red-ball cricket, cramming in all their white-ball practice into the remaining 20 per cent. Instead, Ripley ensured that Northants would spend half their training time on the two white-ball formats.
Similar principles applied to Northants’ recruitment. Rather than signing players based on their four-day prowess, Northants increasingly targeted players based on their white-ball skills. So Steven Crook, the Middlesex all-rounder, a player combining canny bowling, electric fielding and six-hitting, returned to the club. Cameron White, one of the lone successes of the 2012 T20 season, was retained as overseas player for the Blast, while the belligerent hitter Richard Levi
was signed, an example of how Northants have focused on players’ worth, not their waists.
Particularly important was how Ripley cultivated the Lancashire and Yorkshire leagues for untapped talent outside the county system. Under his reign, Northants have signed three fast bowlers aged 26 and above from these leagues. Each has been stunningly successful: Azharullah, with his brilliant array of yorkers at the death, who was spotted after a tip-off by Ralph Middlebrook, the father of James; Richard Gleeson, with unusual pace for the county circuit; and Ben Sanderson, who is more suited to first-class cricket but took 5-52 across two victories on finals day last season.
These tactics have been married to the smart use of data too, which Ripley recognises can provide teams with a small-but-significant edge. In 2010, the England and Wales Cricket Board mandated that every county log every ball in an analysis database. Richard Barker was employed by Northants to do the job, but the club did not think he could provide any help with performance analysis. Indeed, in 2012, Northants were the only county not to film their T20 games.
That all changed when Ripley took over. Barker was enlisted to analyse where the side was going wrong in T20. The answer was simple: they didn’t hit enough boundaries. While Yorkshire, losing finalists in 2012, averaged 91.45 runs in boundaries an innings, Northants averaged 53.45, the lowest of any county, and only hit 14.25 runs in sixes per innings. Ripley fed the numbers back to the team, liberating the players to be more aggressive and innovative to score quickly.
Before Ripley took over, Barker compiled a dossier identifying a ‘magic number’ of 160, a match-winning score by the team batting first in 65 per cent of games. He laid out a roadmap of how to get there: hitting 15 fours, three sixes and scoring 82 runs off the other 102 balls to reach 160. Barker’s findings were essentially ignored, but Ripley embraced them, using them to construct his T20 strategy. Since 2013, they have scored the highest proportion of runs in boundaries of any county.
As well as generic strategy of how to win T20 matches, Barker has helped with Northants’ tactics for each match. Before every match, a sheet of paper is hung up on the dressing room wall outlining the strengths and weaknesses of batsmen and bowlers, and a few crucial stats – like a batsman’s strike rate against different types of bowlers, or where an opposing bowler tends to bowl at the death – that can inform action on the field. Occasionally, Wakely has even been known to ask the 12th man to fetch out the sheet. Before playing Middlesex in this year’s T20 quarter-final, Barker compiled a 25-page dossier for Wakely.
All of this has been underpinned by continuity. Ripley and Phil Rowe, the 2nd XI coach and Academy director, have been at the helm for five years. An apparent weakness – Northants’ small squad – has been turned into a strength. It allows for role clarity and cohesion, and players to master their roles.
Northants have a system built to deliver sustainable success, then, but continuing to achieve it will be harder than ever. Moving this year’s T20 Blast to a more concise schedule will make it easier for wealthier counties to sign up star players for the duration of the tournament and properly integrate them into the side. And as T20 is taken ever more seriously, as revealed by Derbyshire and Middlesex becoming the first ever counties to hire specialist T20 coaches, Northants’ advantage in being one of few teams to prioritise it will be eroded. When Michael Lewis released
Moneyball in 2003, other teams, with a bigger budget, were encouraged to mimic the Oakland Athletics’ methods, and they lost their competitive advantage. Now other counties could do the same to Northants. So extending their T20 dynasty into 2017 and beyond will be even more demanding for Northants. But how they will relish trying.
Richard Barker was enlisted to analyse where the side was going wrong. Simple: they didn’t hit enough boundaries