can quantify the advantage: winning the

toss is worth, on average, 28 runs or

just under one wicket.
The shift towards covered pitches from
the 1970s onwards had a signicant
efect on this gure. In the years between
1877 and 1969, the toss was worth 40
runs on average. With uncovered pitches
tending to deteriorate as the game
progressed, 89 per cent of captains who
won the toss batted rst.
Even the 11 per cent brave enough to
field first lost more games (26) than
they won (23). Nasser Hussain in 2002
was not the first England captain to
be fooled by the Brisbane pitch: Len
Hutton infamously elected to bowl
first in 1954, resulting in the following
Wisden match report:
Nothing went right for the Englishmen
above everything else the whole course
of the game probably turned on the
decision of Hutton, after winning the
toss, to give Australia rst innings. Never
before had an England captain taken
such a gamble in Australia and certainly
never before in a Test match had a side
replied with a total of 601 after being
sent in to bat.
Since 1970, though, the advantage of
winning the toss has fallen from 40 to 24
runs, and the ratio of captains winning
the toss and batting rst has fallen from
89 per cent to 66 per cent. Importantly,
those captains who have won the toss and
bowled rst have largely been rewarded
for their enterprise (Hussain is a notable
exception), winning 179 of those games
and losing just 150. Captains who have
won the toss and batted rst have not
been rewarded, winning 319 games and
losing 318.
The statistics suggest that bowling
first is an under-employed strategy
in the modern game. Most of the Test
matches with a positive result played
since 1970 have been won by the side
bowling first (497 out of 966), and yet
two-thirds of captains in that period
have elected to bat.
Where, then, is it most important to
win the toss? As might be expected,
the overall benefit of winning the
toss of 24 runs (well take the figure
since 1970) varies widely between
countries. Intuition suggests that the
dry pitches of the subcontinent might
be the ones on which winning the toss
is most important; indeed, the Asian
nations make up three of the top four
most toss-friendly countries. The big
surprise is England, coming in at No.2,
where winning the toss has historically
been worth 58 runs; there, the toss-
winning team are 23 per cent more
likely to win the game. The full table is
below (qualification: 100 Tests in the
country):
Country / Value of the toss (in runs) /
Win/Loss ratio of team winning the toss
Sri Lanka 60 1.24
England 58 1.23
Pakistan 33 1.13
India 28 1.00
Australia 10 1.06
West Indies 9 1.00
South Africa 7 1.17
New Zealand -12 0.93
! #$$% &$'' &$ ($')
David Franklin pushes crickets (sealed) envelope

Anton Chigurh, the villain of Cormac
McCarthys No Country for Old Men, plays
a simple game with those unlucky enough
to cross his path. One toss of a coin
decides their fate: heads they live, tails
they die. His brutality is fearsome indeed:
a potent cocktail of death and recreation
bearing all the hallmarks of a psychopath.
The ICC has come in for criticism of all
sorts during its 105-year existence, but
no one has so far accused its officials
of such cold-blooded malice. And yet
there are pitches around the world on
which captains, waiting in suspended
animation as the coin falls, must see
in the shadow of the watching match
referee the spectre of Chigurh. Lose the
toss, lose the game. No losing captain in
todays media-savvy era would ever go
so far as to say that the toss decided the
match; plenty, of course, would want to.
It is worth examining the efect of
the toss in the context of a proposed
alternative. Under a sealed bid system
to be discussed later the winning
captain has choice of innings but must
concede a pre-declared number of runs
to the opposition.
The toss has, over the entire history of
Test cricket, provided a slight but clear
advantage to the winner. Of the 1,397
matches that have produced a winner,
737 of those (53 per cent) were won by
the team winning the toss, and 660 (47
per cent) by the team losing it. (This is
a statistically signicant ratio at the 95
per cent condence level, suggesting
the perceived advantage is unlikely to
be the result of natural variance alone.)
Batsmen playing for the team winning
the toss have averaged 32.81; those
playing for the team losing the toss
have averaged 31.40. By multiplying the
diference between the two (1.41) by
the number of wickets each team has
at its disposal in a Test match (20), we
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THENIGHTWATCHMAN DAVID FRANKLIN
He did, though, in our scenario, win the
bid in the first Test by 20 runs to 15.
Bowling first at Cardiff for the previous
Test turned out to be a shrewd decision,
allowing Australia to bowl England out
cheaply in the first innings and control
the game to victory on the fifth day as
batting conditions improved. Alastair
Cook, keen to give Jimmy Anderson
and Stuart Broad the first crack with a
swinging ball this time around, sits in
the Lords dressing-room and mulls over
his options.
He believes elding rst is worth at
least an early wicket, which against
Australia is somewhere in the region of
45 runs. He also knows that, since 1970,
the toss has been worth a mammoth
71 runs on average at Lords, with the
captain calling correctly having won 59
per cent more Test matches. Most of
them, though, batted rst and Clarke
has never gone any higher than 25 in
the bid. For Cook, it would be folly to
give away more runs than he needs to.
In the end, Cook bids 42 runs, keen to
beat away a bid of 40 from Clarke, or a
possible bid of 41 designed to beat his
own 40 bid.
In the other dressing-room, Clarke has
already made up his mind. Maybe its
a bowling morning, but there are five
days to this Test, and all this statistical
stuff is pure ivory-tower nonsense. He
knows Cook is likely to want to bowl
first given the conditions and the result
at Cardiff. Clarke bids zero a strong
statement of intent and faith in his
batsmen. It has the added benefit of
making Cook look foolish for giving
away all of those runs for free, when he
could have won with a bid of just 1 run.
First blood to Australia, who effectively
start the game 42 for 0.
Lets pause here and take a wander around
Lords. We still have half an hour to go
before the start of the match. We know
the teams; we know whos batting rst;
we knew all along that the winner of the
auction would probably bowl. Spectators
continue to lter in rapidly through the
turnstiles. The murmur intensies as the
start of play approaches; what are they
discussing now?
The conversations are still full of debate,
in a way they were not in the era of
the coin toss. Many believe that Cook
has nally lost it, with the award of 42
free runs to the old enemy something
abhorrent. Some tentatively agree but
are secretly relieved to be bowling rst;
the air is only getting muggier, and the
ball should hoop round corners. A small
minority have like Cook calculated
that 42 runs is only one wicket, and are
backing the English bowlers to vindicate
the decision by having Australia four
down at lunch.
My tale stops here; I shall leave it to the
reader to decide whether Anderson and
Broad ripped through the Australian top
order to leave them 70 for 6 at lunch,
or whether a hint of early movement
was soon forgotten on the way to dual
hundreds from David Warner and Clarke
and a closing score of 301 for 3. The
important point is that the game has
at once been made fairer and more
controversial: there is something else
to argue about as the rst bottle of
Prosecco is popped open ten minutes
after the start of play.
The toss of a coin to decide the start of
the game is more than just traditional
it is poetic, and a great leveller. No
matter how large the gap between
teams, the match starts with an act
There are a couple of interesting quirks
to this table in particular, the fact
that extra runs do not translate into a
game-winning advantage in India, and
the negative toss value in New Zealand,
where weather conditions often
change quickly. Lets concentrate,
though, on the imbalance that the toss
creates in matches in those countries
close to the top of the table. Whatever
your views on the sentimental value of
the toss, it is undeniable that cricket
viewed purely from a game-theoretic
point of view is the weaker for it. The
game starts with one side feeling the
odds are already tilted against them;
this is avoidable.
Shrewd-minded parents across the
world have made use of the you cut,
I choose method for dividing cake
among two children. This remarkably
simple algorithm ensures that both
children believe themselves to have won
at least half of the cake, and therefore
at least as much as the other child. You
cut, I choose is an envy-free algorithm:
in the cake-eating game, both children
feel they have been treated fairly. (For
the interested reader, longer envy-
free algorithms exist for dividing cake
among three and four children; none
has yet been found to divide cake
among five.)
An equivalent envy-free algorithm exists
to start a cricket match, in the form of
sealed bids. Both captains submit sealed
bids in runs to the match referee half
an hour before the game. The captain
with the higher gure may choose
whether to bat or to eld rst, but the
number of runs he submits will be added
to the opponents score. As a result,
both captains consider themselves at an
advantage after the bids are announced.
Imagine yourself at Lords on 16 July
2015: the first day of the second
Ashes Test match. Australia won the
first match in a close finish in Cardiff,
chasing down 248 on the final day with
a few overs to spare and four wickets
in hand. The rain has stayed away but
moisture is in the air; it seems very
much a bowlers day. With the pitch
expected to flatten out, Day One could
be crucial.
Those fortunate to have been to
Lords on the first morning of a Test
know that early-bird murmur so well;
that English expression of mutual
expectation over breakfast. Delve
into the white noise and you will find
thousands of conversations largely
focused on whos playing and what
the winner of the toss should do. Both
of these subjects provide opportunity
for debate; sometimes there are close
calls to be made and the murmur
will acknowledge both sides of the
argument. Neither, though, forces
spontaneous debate in the same
way that sealed bids would. Even
with unchanged teams and a clear
advantage to bowling first, sealed bids
challenge every member of the early-
bird audience to come up with his own
figure, to be pitted against those of
cricket-lovers and pundits everywhere,
and eventually against the numbers
bid by the opposing captains.
The strategy can get complex. What
you bid is not only a function of what
you think the bat-or-field option is
worth, but also what you expect your
opponent to bid. Lets assume that, in
June 2015, Australian captain Michael
Clarke already has a reputation as a low-
bidder; hell be damned if hes going to
give away runs for free to the Poms.
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that brings the captains together in a
moment of equal chance and, as the
coin falls, the audience watches on in
hope. But in an era where many wonder
where Test cricket will be in 20 years
time, we need intrigue and debate, not
poetry and tradition. Sealed bids are
a rare way of making our great game
better while courting the controversy
that the sport needs to survive.
Perhaps, in 100 years time, this new
method of starting the game will be
seen as just as traditional as the coin
toss is today.
Anton Chigurhs game of chance is ill-
suited to cricket, which is, at its heart,
chess on grass; a test of skill. The world
of modern cricket is no country for old
men: let the traditional coin-ip die.
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