Heaves and Heuristics
What's in a shot?
It’s nearly 5 pm in Chennai. The shadows are stretching, the harsh brightness of the afternoon giving way to a softer light. There are five minutes left before the end of a day’s play, and an experienced spinner has the ball. You have just taken guard at the crease. Your team is well ahead, but with three days left in the Test, they need to consolidate their position. One false move here, one wicket, and the opposition might find a gap in the door. What would you do?
At Chepauk, Rishabh Pant first swept Shakib al-Hasan for four. The next ball, he shimmied down the track and whacked him for a six.
The first shot made sense—the ball was in his hitting arc and the field was open. The second was more dramatic. Shakib gave this delivery a little more air, hoping to lure Pant into a rash heave. Pant was happy to bite the bait.
Six. The commentators chuckled and the crowd wore grins as wide as the Chepauk ground. Typical Rishabh Pant: audacious, high-risk, box office. How is he a cricketer and not a trapeze artist? Pant, the born entertainer, wears those labels like a badge of honour.
But what if he had miscued the second ball and got out? A lofted shot inherently carries more risk than its grounded alternatives. The applause would have quickly turned to groans of frustration, and fingers would have pointed angrily at the clock on the giant electronic scoreboard. Was it really necessary, we would’ve asked him on his walk back to the pavilion.
Two days after Pant’s pyrotechnics, Manchester City hosted Arsenal Football Club in a top-of-the-table clash in the Premier League. In the first half, Arsenal surged to a 2-1 lead, and then had a player sent off in the final seconds before half time. What followed was a masterclass in defensive resilience. For 45 gruelling minutes, Arsenal, a man down, absorbed Manchester City's relentless attacks like a fortress withstanding a siege. Then, with the last move of the game, Manchester City equalised. 2-2.
The post-match consensus, even amongst a lot of ex-professionals, is that Arsenal should’ve been more enterprising and tried to stretch their lead. That, by sitting too deep, they always risked a punch to the teeth from City. But, weren’t they justified in their caution, considering their excellent defensive record and that they were up against players capable of creating a goal through the eye of a needle?
Many, many years back, one José Mourinho set up his Inter Milan team to sit deep for the entirety of a Champions League semi-final at Barcelona. Inter won, and the match is known as Exhibit A of a Mourinho tactical masterclass.
Outcome bias is an epidemic amongst us, all of us. We have a habit of judging decisions based on the result, instead of the circumstances in which the decision was taken and whether it made logical sense at the moment.
For example, let's say you had a flight on a Wednesday at 11 am. You stay 45 minutes away from the airport, so 8:30-8:45 is a good time to leave. Even accounting for a 15-30-minute traffic cushion, you should reach with more than an hour on your hand. So you book a cab and leave at 8:45. But, hold up. <cue:dramatic violins> There has been a car breakdown on the main highway and that has blocked up the entire road. Even the arteries are clogged because everyone wants to get to work. 9:15 ticks over to 9:30, then 9:45, and you're still a good half-hour away from the terminal. The cars ahead are moving at the rate of one metre-per-minute. By the time you get out of the gridlock, the clock says 10:25, the race is long run.
As you fork over the price of a new BMW for the next flight, you'll kick yourself for not leaving at 8:30, won't you?
The term ‘Outcome Bias’ was brought into the mainstream lexicon somewhere in 1988, through this paper. In one study at the University of Pennsylvania, participants were given a bunch of medical scenarios, and the risks and benefits of every procedure. They were then asked to rate the doctors’ judgement in each case. The results revealed that the participants judged a doctor’s decision far more harshly if the patient had died during the procedure.
In competitive environments like sports, gambling, or financial trading, the bias becomes naturally pronounced. Think of it - if a key batter gets out while playing an aggressive shot, and their team loses control of the game, all eyeballs will go to that moment as the “turning point”. If you’re a certain news channel in India, you’ll call the batter Match ka Mujrim.1
Similarly, we lean on outcomes to evaluate whether a risk was worth taking. In a sport like cricket, where an individual’s action has a high chance of impacting game-state, there is an eagerness in tagging some players as “too risky”. Think Rishabh Pant, and before him, Virender Sehwag, Shahid Afridi, Glen Maxwell and many more. It’s an illustrious list. Some of them are inventive, some have courage bordering on hubris, some are slaves to their own mythos, but all of them see possibilities beyond the last page of the standard coaching manual. Their definition of risk is a footnote, not a chapter.
They challenge what we know as the truth about success in sport. Over generations, we have been told that, to make it at the elite level, you not only need a watertight technique but also an ability to consistently make sensible choices. One of the most popular clichés, and part-myth, in sport is that good players know when to take risks, as if they have a cheat sheet coded into their brain, and that they lean towards equilibrium.
Having the technique of an artist with the mind of a bungee-jumper is, well, not quite recommended.
Take basketball, for instance. A player taking too many long-range shots is often labelled wasteful. Letting fly from outside the three-point line is a low-percentage play. A good player, au contraire, will try to spot gaps to get the ball through to someone closer to the basket. But if the ball is in the hands of Stephen Curry, with enough room to jump, a throw from outside the arc becomes a deadly weapon.
Of course, not everyone comes with the gifts of Steph Curry. So how do we distinguish between wastefulness and aggressive intent? Teams combat outcome bias by relying on granular data. Instead of looking at raw numbers like goals or points, analysts use every moving part of a game as a variable, and judge players based on a matrix of vectors.2
Good players should be able to make logically favourable decisions more often than not. Good coaches and analysts should be able to tell the difference between a decision and its result.
Probabilistic thinking doesn’t occur naturally to the average fan like you and I. Neither do we have petabytes of sophisticated data on our fingertips. So we reach for the comfort blanket of conventional wisdom, of accepted truths. Don’t throw away wickets in Test cricket; if a shot on goal is unlikely, pass it to someone in a better position; leave for the airport the earliest you can - you get the drift.
Then comes Rishabh Pant, tonking his second Test ball into the stands, reverse-lapping fast bowlers, dancing down to spinners on turning pitches. He completely throws us off balance. Sometimes he trips himself too, and occasionally, that fall ruins the show. But is his cricket truly a high-wire act over a sea of flames?
Not even nearly. Even the most bizarre of his tricks are rarely random. He's not affecting a persona, not playing to the gallery - he's leaning into his own strengths. He has executed these shots hundreds of times in the nets before unfurling them against international bowlers. And, like his friends in the Risks Unlimited Club™, he knows that a spoonful of balance is essential to make the aggression effective.
Mavericks like Pant are great for sport and incredibly fun to watch. Besides being technically sound, they see opportunity where most others see danger. When Shakib tossed up the second delivery at Chepauk, the glint in Pant's eyes was visible even from the far seats. He fancied his chances of clearing the ropes, he committed to the stroke, and even if he had miscued, he'd have chalked it up as a calculated gamble. These are the players who haunt opponents’ dreams, because, even in defence, their machetes remain in their front pocket.
Just ask anyone who played against Virender Sehwag. Especially those who played against him on a hot afternoon in Chennai.