Manchester United, Moneyball and Pakistan: how Desert Vipers cracked ILT20

The confetti was still being cleared, the stage being struck, and the players dispersing to various points of the globe, but the news agenda was already moving on apace.

A little over 12 hours after the Desert Vipers had set the seal on a much-deserved first title in the DP World International League T20 in Dubai, their owner had other pressing business in the UK.

Avram Glazer had watched his cricket team’s 46-run demolition of MI Emirates in Sunday’s final sat alongside Sheikh Nahyan bin Mubarak in the Royal Box at Dubai International Stadium.

The American businessman chose Dubai over one of his other concerns, Manchester United, who had been in action against Leeds United on the same day in English football’s Premier League.

The contrast between Glazer’s cricket and football operations is polar. The football team is one of glorious history but a dysfunctional present – as evidence by the decision on Monday morning to part with their latest head coach, Ruben Amorim.

The Vipers cricket team, meanwhile, are a four-year-old startup, playing in a league that is still a fair way from establishing a committed following.

And, clearly, the challenges pressing on the different sports are vastly different. For example, the entire budget for the Vipers’ Season 4 campaign is around the same as Casemiro earns in a month for playing in United’s midfield.

Avram Glazer, right, has forms of ownership in the Desert Vipers and Manchester United, but chose to spend last Sunday in Dubai, alongside Sheikh Nahayan Mabarak Al Nahayan, Chairman of the Emirates Cricket Board, rather than his English Premier League team. Photo by CREIMAS / ILT20

But the Vipers have quickly become the benchmark for how to run a new T20 cricket franchise. So much so that it would not have been too much of a surprise if Glazer had sidled over to Tom Moody, the Vipers director of cricket, during the celebrations and said: “Tom, we’re about to have a vacancy elsewhere in the company. Do you fancy it?”

Even though they had been the outstanding side across the campaign, there had been nerves for the Vipers ahead of the final.

They had won more matches than anyone else since the league started four years ago, yet still had no trophy to show for it, having lost twice in finals.

Plus they were playing against the biggest T20 behemoth in the world. Mumbai Indians and their affiliates had not lost a final anywhere, in either the men’s or women’s game, since 2010 before Sunday.

Billy Beane, the mastermind behind the Moneyball methods which inspire so much reverence in sport, would have approved of how the Vipers ultimately felled the giant.

From the league’s inception, the Vipers formula has been informed by statistical analysis of the sort promoted by Beane at the Oakland Athletics in baseball.

Led since the start by Phil Oliver, the co-founder of CricViz – the sport’s leading data analytics and statistics provider – and now Vipers chief executive, they have used data-driven methods to help construct a winning team.

The Vipers fit the template of Moneyball all too perfectly: for all their consistency over the four seasons, they had fallen short at finals time.

Beane always did regard post-season play-offs as a lottery. Given the small sample size of one-off matches, finals successes can never be guaranteed. And yet on Sunday, they made it over the line.

Moneyball is not a term you hear so much of in cricket these days