Meet the mastermind behind England’s scouting revolution
Mo Bobat is playing key role in finding next crop of Test match talent, writes Tim Wigmore
There is only one constant in selection meetings for England’s Under-19s, Lions and the senior men’s side. “I sit in on all squad selections,” says Mo Bobat. “I’m able to provide a consistent thread.”
Bobat, employed by the England and Wales Cricket Board, is in charge of devising the structure to identify prospective international players and since the start of last summer has attended all selection meetings for the senior squad. He does not have a direct voice in selection; his job is “providing information and checking and challenging the process”.
“We’re hard-wired to have biases,” Bobat notes. He tries to prevent these and encourages selectors to think more deeply. In any scouting or selection meetings “there’s five or six information sources”, he explains. “So, if what the scout is saying doesn’t match what the reports say, I probe and ask questions. If what the scouts are saying doesn’t match what the performance stats are saying, I’ll probe again and ask questions.”
Bobat has also introduced a counter-intuitive concept. Before selection meetings, particularly for the Under-19s, selectors are encouraged not to talk to each other for a couple of days. This means they “probably do a bit more interrogation themselves. So they might go back and look at what the data’s telling them, look at what the performance analysis suggests or speak to one of the scouts again”.
It is a glimpse into one of the most challenging jobs in English cricket. Bobat, 36, studied sports science and management, and was then a sports science lecturer at a further education college in Leicester, his home town. He was also a PE teacher and qualified cricket coach before beginning work for the ECB in 2011.
Since being promoted in 2016, he has been at the apex of attempts to develop and select talent. Last year, 209 players were assessed by England’s scouts, who compiled 1,213 player reports. Each report includes answers to about 25 questions, tailored towards what level the player is being considered for and their specific skills.
Questions range from the cricketing to the physical and psychological. While most answers are selected from a comparative scale, with players ranked against their peers, scouts also record what they consider a player’s strengths and weaknesses, and make predictions about their future. For Under-19 players, scouts are asked whether a player could thrive in first-class cricket; for Lions players, whether they could deliver in international cricket.
All of this represents the implementation of Andrew Strauss’s vision. As director of cricket from 2015-18, Strauss preached “multiple eyes, multiple times”. Each prospective player would be watched by an array of scouts from a network which now numbers 25.
Yet just watching a lot of cricket does not make an elite scouting system. “You often get excited by something technical or physical that catches the eye,” Bobat says. “And you might not take time to understand their character or personality and the things they can bring to a team environment. The greater breadth of information we have, the smarter the decisions we’ll be able to make.”
For instance, England now take proper account of the relative age effect – the differing rates of maturation of players, partly because some can be born 364 days later than those in the same school year – in selecting age group sides. “I don’t see that as rocket science. It’s probably indicative of us being not in a good place previously – and I don’t just mean us, sport in general – that we didn’t think it was significant.”
In his visits to other sports teams, Bobat was struck by Southampton’s famous “black box” – which records all information on prospective players and coaches – and how simply the information was presented. “What we don’t want is confused decision-making.”
To avoid this, Bobat oversees the documentation of scouts’ judgments. This enables precise recollections of how a player performed – the brain’s memory is not a trustworthy tool – and allows Bobat to assess the assessors.
“We can look at scouts’ preferences and biases – like about certain types of player, or attributes they favour,” he explains. “Soon, I’ll be able to say who are my better scouts? I’ve been asking [the scouts] to make predictions – are they coming true?”
There are some encouraging signs: so far, scouts have predicted, to more than 80 per cent accuracy whether players aged 15-16 would go on to represent the Lions. “If you give it another four or five years, we’ll be able to tell whether they’re any good at predicting England level.”
Retrospective scouting analysis has found that one of the greatest predictors of subsequently being picked for England is a player’s inner drive, as reported by scouts. This might be because the drive allows the players to excel, or simply because “you’re biased and you’re just picking players that seem to work hard”.
‘The more info we have, the smarter the calls we will be able to make’
Bobat has also found that traditional batting and bowling averages are “not predictive metrics”, leading to England’s embrace of weighted averages. And he is exploring whether the speed at which a player transitions from first-class to international cricket may have a bearing on their subsequent success.
The next frontier in talent identification, Bobat believes, will be sophisticated ball-tracking data for every county match, enabling selectors to gauge precisely how players perform in the situations that most resemble international cricket.
“If every ground had Hawk-eye, all of a sudden you could start to do things differently.”