ECB to fund a PhD to investigate ‘Addressing Selection Bias and Injury Risk in English Youth Cricket: A Growth and Maturation Research Programme’ FINALLY!!!

While this is incredibly welcome, it’s also long overdue. After reading the full project description some interesting points come out:

• It’s not specific that both girls and boys Academies will be investigated. We know RAE is an issue in women & girls cricket. We also know that maturation selection bias could exhibit very different outcomes in girls cricket environments.
• It’s titled ‘Addressing’ selection bias, whereas there is nothing included in the ‘Developing and evaluating prevention strategies’ about addressing selection bias, only addressing injury prevention. The ECB are supposed to be evaluating the use of Age Ordered Numbered Bibs for attenuating RAE in training/match play environments where players are being compared.
• It states the ECB recommends growth and maturation monitoring as best practice in athlete development and injury prevention, but then reveals that the extent to which these recommendations are implemented across English cricket is unclear! Surely, these fundamental procedures protecting athlete health are a duty of care issue and should already be part of the County Partnership Agreement… obviously not.
• RAE in Academies is to be investigated. While it’s good to get the full picture by multiple researchers, it’s pretty bloody obvious what they are going to find. Two papers showing RAE in the English National Talent Pathway, for both boys & girls, already exist.
• It would probably be a good idea to also include ‘training age’ or experience level within the study as this is a likely confounding factor. An example of this would be the effects of attending an independent school with a world class cricketing programme.
• An interesting ‘gotcha’ is that the scope of this study covers Academies only and not the National Talent Pathway. This is how a recent ECB sponsored paper was conducted in the girls pathway, finding RAE but with a low effect size, principally due to a cross-sectional, small sample size.
• This study may also shine a light on the incidence of Lumbar Bone Stress Injuries (stress fractures) in adolescent bowlers.

If you want to know more about RAE & Maturation Selection Bias in cricket this article, ‘Unnatural Selection: The Myths and Misconceptions of Relative Age Effects and Maturation Biases’ was co-authored with one of the PhD supervisors, Prof. Sean Cumming, in Jan 2023.