Cricket and the Cosmos: Inside the Mind of Himanish Ganjoo
Here's all you need to know about Himanish Ganjoo: He's one of the world's most respected voices and thinkers when it comes to cricket stats and data analysis and he recently used that expertise to help India capture the 2024 T20 World Cup -- the team's first major international championship in over a decade. The scary part? Cricket isn't even his main gig. Ganjoo is a physicist who recently received his PhD in Cosmology. And he's about to move from the US, where he's been studying, to France -- where cricket is even less of a blip on the radar than in the US -- to begin his postdoc work in mathematical stuff that neither I, you, nor anyone that you know will ever be able to understand or comprehend.
I caught up with Himanish and -- due to my weak knowledge of dark energy's role in the expansion of the universe -- decided to keep the conversation focused on cricket.
"Cricket is always a presence in India," says Ganjoo. "When you grow up, your family is watching it. Your friends are watching it. Any birthday party in my childhood had to involve cricket. Cricket was everywhere in our childhood. And when I went to undergrad, I started thinking about the numbers -- something beyond basic averages, something beyond basic numbers -- and that's how I got into it, really. I started writing on numbers around 2015, which is almost a decade ago. It was very rudimentary stuff. I didn't know how to code, so I learned how to code. I learned how to build my own database and I used that to push out some blogs. You can't really avoid cricket in India. I like thinking about the game and I like thinking about numbers, as well. So, I just married the two at some point."
Unlike baseball or basketball, where you can easily compare stats from a game played in, say, New York with a game played in Los Angeles or Chicago or Seoul, Korea, or Madrid, Spain, the differing pitch conditions in various parts of the cricket-playing world can make such comparisons more problematic. The game simply plays a bit differently depending on whether you're in Melbourne, Mumbai, or Morrisville.
"One of the challenges with cricket numbers is always to put them in context of conditions. As we've improved cricket data, we've got tracking data now, so we can track conditions," Himanish explains. "The first level of research is now to understand these conditions better using trends. You say something like, "If you play in South Africa, you have high bounce." Now what does that high bounce mean? You can use tracking data to understand that high bounce not only means high bounce, it means you need taller bowlers to bowl. When you have a taller bowler, the ball bangs into the pitch harder. And not only does it get you bounce, it also gets you seam off the pitch. So, to get seam off the pitch, you need a taller bowler in South Africa or Australia. These are the things which people have talked about for many years, for many decades, but at this point, we are trying to use data to really confirm those trends with numbers."
Similarly, a recent piece he wrote for ESPNcricinfo with Sidarth Monga points out the trend for spinners in the IPL to be bowling shorter and with more pace.
"For a spinner, there are two standard lengths. There's a four-to-five-meter length and a five-to-six-meter length. There's a payoff between risk and reward depending on the length you bowl. If you bowl the four-to-five-meter length, you're slightly fuller. And because you are slightly fuller, you will go for more runs, but you'll also take more wickets. So, there's a trade-off between the two. In this year's IPL, the pitches were that flat that the four-to-five-meter length was just going for runs and not yielding wickets. Something had changed. The pitches had changed. And that got us thinking about how spinners have changed their trends over the years."
And it was his writing work that led to his position as data analysist for the Indian team that recently won the T20 World Cup.
"The former coach of the Indian team, Rahul Dravid, sent me an email about two years ago. He read my work at Cricinfo and he was looking for some sort of data work to help them. He got in touch with me and offered me a position with the team -- a remote position helping them with data. I was doing background cricket research. I was providing insight based on strategy. I was doing research on our own players. It was a very broad role."
And how difficult was the transition from writing about data to using that data to improve player performance?
"My writing for Cricinfo was focused on the general trends. In a generic T20, how do you chase or how many boundaries can you hit? When you work for a team, it's a slightly different role. You have to zero in on actionable insight that you can give to the coaches that they can then use. It's a very different realm of understanding the game. It's a very different sort of scale that you have to focus on. And, ideally, you should be able to focus on both scales. The broader scale helps you sort of understand the theory of the game. You have to build a model of the game inside your head in order to think about how it works, but then you need to apply that knowledge downstream of that model to some bowler or some batter. So, you have to understand both realms."
And what was it like when the team won their first World Cup since 2011?
"We were in the stands and I sobbed for a good ten minutes. Because of the amount of emotion that goes into being with the team and just knowing what they've gone through and the amount of planning we've put in, it was just amazing to be there and watch that win. This process of modifying our T20 game had been put in place about two and a half years before this World Cup, so it was a long journey for us. To see it come to this fruit was great."
Ganjoo's tenure with the team ended with the departure of Dravid as coach, but the timing for him couldn't have been better. This fall he'll be taking his talents to the Observatoire du Paris in Meudon, France, where his focus will be less on World Cups and more on how the world actually began.
"Cosmology I've loved since I was twelve. I got gifted a book by Stephen Hawking and I read that and that's what I wanted to do since I was a teen. And, thankfully, I've finished my PhD and I'm now going for a very cool postdoc in Paris. That's something I've been wanting to do since I was a kid. That's been my first love." He laughs, "Cricket was on the side."
Hopefully, once he starts his research in France, it won't be "billions and billions of years" before the cricket world hears from Himanish again.
© CricAmerica.com/Steve Steinberg 2024
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