Arrogant IPL owners must admit mistakes

Are Rajasthan Royals the Oakland A's of cricket? Devotees of excellent sporting literature will need no introduction to Moneyball, a terrific yarn about how the A's, a relatively low-budget baseball team ($41million - about £22million - to spend on players counts as low budget in American sport), consistently outperformed their more illustrious and wealthier rivals by dint of the unorthodox coaching methods of Billy Beane, their general manager.

The basic premise of Beane's coaching philosophy was that age-old wisdom, in the form of gnarled tobacco-spitting scouts, was subjective and flawed and did not stand up to the scrutiny of statistics and empirical data. And that many of the statistics used, such as batting averages, were too general and vague and irrelevant compared with less utilised and understood statistics such as, say, on-base percentage and slugging percentage (don't ask me, either).