Rauf, Curran, Clarke, Swepson: Inside the Stars’ search for a maiden BBL title triumph
Some clubs have a draft war room. Melbourne Stars have draft war Zooms. TIM MICHELL uncovers how the Stars have built a team they think can end the BBL’s longest trophy drought.
Some clubs have a draft war room.
Melbourne Stars have draft war Zooms.
The club’s powerbrokers have to navigate a nine-hour time difference with UK-based coach Peter Moores to lock in the online meetings which will determine their BBL draft strategy.
Those meetings started months ago as the Stars examined the fallout from a Jekyll-and-Hyde campaign which started with five consecutive losses but ended with a finals berth.
“First of all you’re not really discussing players. It’s more trying to work out the game style we want to play and what’s missing from our list to be able to achieve that,” Stars high performance manager and former international quick Clint McKay says.
One of the first holes identified was a spin bowler, a crucial part of the club’s strategy for success at the MCG.
READ MORE: The big problem standing between BBL and draft revolution
That was ticked off in early February when the Stars lured Mitch Swepson on a three-year deal from Brisbane Heat, allowing McKay, Moores and their team to move on to other priorities.
The Stars held pick 7 in the first round of the BBL15 draft and a few weeks out had narrowed their choice down to 15-20 fast bowlers.
“Some are not realistic, or we’re no chance of getting and others are quite realistic,” McKay said.
“It’s just trying to marry up what’s best for us and how that fits in, not just skill wise but also personality wise. Because we know we need greater connection within our team.
“The ones that seem to be the most successful over the last 5-6 years, the Sydney Sixers and Perth Scorchers, they’ve very much had a similar side throughout those years. It’s how we create that connection amongst our group.”
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With Pakistani superstar Shaheen Shah Afridi rightly among McKay’s ‘not realistic’ list - he was taken at No.1 as expected by the Brisbane Heat - other names needed to be considered.
One the Stars know well is Haris Rauf, who they plucked from obscurity while playing in Launceston to become one of the BBL’s most fearsome quicks.
They know he is going to be a popular target for rival clubs. So the question is do they activate their retention selection or let him go and find a new fast bowler?
“I think we’ll have four (names) for our first pick,” McKay said.
“Being pick seven, we think that should be enough. But also too you’ve got a couple in the back of your mind just in case things happen to go pear-shaped.”
Rauf, Shaheen, New Zealand duo Lockie Ferguson and Adam Milne and Pakistan’s Hasan Ali were the quicks the Stars settled on.
They’ve got a plan. And ultimately plan A came off, more on that later, but the Stars
were armed with a contingency for the contingency and those options required mountains of research and discussion.
READ MORE: Every pick: Pakistan superstar joins BBL’s most lethal attack
THE NUMBERS MAN
Tim Kendrew is the numbers man.
As Cricket Victoria’s performance analyst, Kendrew has access to a deep database of players from around the world which helps cement - or disprove - the Stars’ thinking.
McKay, Moores and general manager Max Abbott can have a gut feel about a player, but it’s Kendrew who backs up their intuition with figures.
“Once we have got the majority of our local players locked in, it’s then, ‘OK, where are the main holes for us to address?’ That’s the starting point,” Kendrew said.
“Then it’s tracking those types of players you’re after across other leagues and what they’ve done.
“I tend to look at the last two, sometimes three seasons of data, depending on how many leagues players have played in and those sort of things and different conditions. Then the difficulty, particularly for the men’s draft, is the availability.”
More than 400 of the 435 players available in the BBL15 Draft have nominated contracts for the full season and finals.
It is a far cry from recent seasons, when the Big Bash League has been competing, largely unsucccessfully, with the UAE-based ILT20 and South Africa’s T20 competition for talent.
While the move to a June draft forced clubs to select players more than five months before the season, it guaranteed stars such as Shaheen, Babar Azam and Moahmmad Rizwan would be available.
“Our priority is to get someone available for the full season,” McKay said.
“But in saying that if all of a sudden someone slips to our pick that we think is an incredible player, proper world-class player that is going to be a difference maker for those games they are available, it might allow us to pivot a little bit.”
Part one of the Stars’ planning involves identifying a weakness.
Part two is pinpointing the type of player who can address it.
Then it’s over to Kendrew to crunch the numbers and find the players who fit the parameters the Stars are after.
“You’re tracking a group of 50-odd players for a particular skill set,” Kendrew, who has worked with Trent Rockets in The Hundred, said.
“Then as you get closer and closer to the draft it’s narrowing it down based on the more information that you’re getting through from the different comps that have been happening.”
Who wins the battle when it comes to data versus instinct though?
Kendrew concedes numbers can only tell part of the story.
“I have been involved with teams before that have been found out by selecting players that haven’t been able to cope with the conditions in Australia, batting-wise,” he said.
“It’s really important to try and canvass everyone’s opinions on what they have seen, rather than just relying on the data.
“The way I look at it, you go ‘this is the type of player we’re after, these are the benchmarks that we have in terms of what we want our player to be capable of doing, go through that list with the coaches and some of the senior players to then I guess filter in their information - what they have seen and what they know about those players from a capability standpoint and how they’d work in our conditions.”
One of Kendrew’s priorities this year was pinpointing the right wicketkeeper-batter to fit the Stars’ needs.
English trio Laurie Evans, Michael Pepper and Tom Alsop made the final list alongside former Star Joe Clarke.
It was Clarke’s record in Australia - he averages 27 with a strike rate of 133 in the BBL - which put him at the top of the pile
FACT FROM FICTION
Part of McKay’s job is sorting fact from fiction as draft scuttlebutt intensifies.
“Sometimes the information you get, clubs are trying to lead you up the garden path to try and distract from what you’re trying to do as well,” he says.
One of those nuggets before the BBL15 draft involved Evans, one of the batters in the mix for the Stars’ third pick.
“We believed Perth Scorchers moved their picks around (in a swap with Sydney Thunder) to get Laurie,” McKay said after the draft.
“So we thought that was going to free up Joe nicely for us. That worked out perfectly.”
One certainty he could rely on was English all-rounder Tom Curran would return for a second season in green.
Curran was locked in as one of the Stars’ draft picks after he was pre-signed to a deal for BBL15.
The Stars’ third pick, the penultimate selection in the draft at No.31, was slated for a batter to fill the void left by Ben Duckett’s absence.
Duckett, who made 243 runs in seven innings last season, will take centre stage for England against the new ball in the Ashes.
The Stars identified their top-order as an issue after Tom Rogers (46 runs at 5) and Sam Harper (153 at 14) struggled in BBL14 and Beau Webster departed to reigning champion Hobart Hurricanes.
“Our third pick, we’ve gone through 50, 60, 70 names,” McKay said.
“Some are pie in the sky…but we’re just making sure we cover off all the names because we don’t want them to slip through that’s for sure.”
PLAN INTO PRACTICE
The results of months of planning boil down to 60-second calls on draft day.
And the Stars’ planning came to the fore less than two minutes in when Adelaide Strikers tried to poach their speedster Rauf.
The Stars’ pick 7 transformed into pick 2 when McKay and Kendrew pulled the trigger on their retention pick, warding off a heist from Tim Paine and the Strikers’ brains trust.
“We got the sense that there was a few teams looking for a fast bowler - particularly the Strikers,” Kendrew said.
“We expected that someone would bid for him. Because we had the retention right to match for him, we were just going to match for him no matter what.”
Clarke, a player who has scored 862 runs in 29 games for the Stars, was locked in at pick 18.
Post-draft, McKay revealed Rauf and Clarke were two of the first names discussed in the club’s initial strategy meeting months ago.
“We’ve done all this work and we probably (discussed) Haris in the first five minutes,” he said.
“The next 15 minutes was Joe Clarke. We could have probably been done in 20 minutes.
“But we made sure no stone was unturned and went through every player around to make sure we were doing the right thing.”
When he wakes, Moores will find out the draft mission - carried out in the early morning England time - was a success.
It will be more than five months before the first ball of BBL15 is bowled and the Stars’ quest for a drought-breaking BBL title begins in earnest with Rauf, Curran and Clarke at the forefront.
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