Varun
ICC Board Member
- Joined
- Mar 14, 2009
- Location
- Delhi, India
- Online Cricket Games Owned
-
- Don Bradman Cricket 14 - Steam PC
In the era of extremely efficient and accurate technology and real-time stats-tracking, it isn't a surprise that statistics are tissues and ligaments to sports analyses. Maybe it is because of cricket's old school nature, but the sport lags behind in the availability of specific statistics and metrics compared to much of american sports and soccer. An example would be the NBA, where simply raw numbers (game totals and per-game totals) don't matter as much now as they used to be. You employ a myriad statistics and metrics such as shooting efficiencies, true-shooting percentages and even more general metrics such as the Player Impact Estimation, PER (Player Efficiency Rating), Efficiency, Win Shares are employed which measure the impact and contribution of players to the game, based on simple formulas. Recently the website induced a statistical revolution by making advance statistics available to all of public, so one can essentially view, let's say how good a certain player 1 plays against another player 2 with a player 3 on the court during home games. There's no need to say how greatly these stats can influence team strategy and besides stats junkies like me love it.
Coming back to cricket, the sport has never undergone a statistical revolution, which again, is probably due to the old school nature of the game. We've access to only the basic stats, that is the total runs scored or wickets taken the averages, strike rates, economy rates and all available statistics online work either on these or on filters based on these (average of player 1 against a certain team for example). We've still no metrics that'd measure the impact of players in games. No metrics that take into account the overall increase in average runs scored in ODIs over the years. We don't know whether a batsman averaging 40 runs per game with a S/R of 75 or averaging 35 with S/R 90 is better. Or a bowlers with an average of 28 and economy 5.5 or an average of 30 or economy 4.5. We can speculate and theorize but we don't have concrete stats. In this era of T20, when batsman aren't even going to play as much test or ODI games as their predecessors did over their careers, we will never be able to compare the impacts they made on the game. Wagon Wheels, spiders, graphs aren't available collectively online. No tracking of on drives, square drives and other shot types and the percentage of runs scored or strike-rates. Thus, in short, cricket as a sport is severely lacking in advanced statistics.
Now I've no formal training in statistics, but this thread could serve as a discussion for leading to at least a miniature form of advanced statistics. Or at least some healthy discussion, as this seems to me a topic where although we lack direction, interest would certainly be there. Examples of advanced statistics would include:
Batting Impact Estimate
Bowling Impact Estimate
Fielding Impact Estimate
Catches per Fielding Position
Direct hits per attempts
Catch Rate (catches per total number of attempts)
Shot Strike Rate
Wagon Wheels (career)
Partnership strike-rates
I'll add more.
EDIT: an instance of overall ratings for players is found in Syedur Rehman's Cricksim which assigns an overall rating to players based on their batting and bowling ratings. But since it is based on ratings itself, it isn't of much use.
Coming back to cricket, the sport has never undergone a statistical revolution, which again, is probably due to the old school nature of the game. We've access to only the basic stats, that is the total runs scored or wickets taken the averages, strike rates, economy rates and all available statistics online work either on these or on filters based on these (average of player 1 against a certain team for example). We've still no metrics that'd measure the impact of players in games. No metrics that take into account the overall increase in average runs scored in ODIs over the years. We don't know whether a batsman averaging 40 runs per game with a S/R of 75 or averaging 35 with S/R 90 is better. Or a bowlers with an average of 28 and economy 5.5 or an average of 30 or economy 4.5. We can speculate and theorize but we don't have concrete stats. In this era of T20, when batsman aren't even going to play as much test or ODI games as their predecessors did over their careers, we will never be able to compare the impacts they made on the game. Wagon Wheels, spiders, graphs aren't available collectively online. No tracking of on drives, square drives and other shot types and the percentage of runs scored or strike-rates. Thus, in short, cricket as a sport is severely lacking in advanced statistics.
Now I've no formal training in statistics, but this thread could serve as a discussion for leading to at least a miniature form of advanced statistics. Or at least some healthy discussion, as this seems to me a topic where although we lack direction, interest would certainly be there. Examples of advanced statistics would include:
Batting Impact Estimate
Bowling Impact Estimate
Fielding Impact Estimate
Catches per Fielding Position
Direct hits per attempts
Catch Rate (catches per total number of attempts)
Shot Strike Rate
Wagon Wheels (career)
Partnership strike-rates
I'll add more.
EDIT: an instance of overall ratings for players is found in Syedur Rehman's Cricksim which assigns an overall rating to players based on their batting and bowling ratings. But since it is based on ratings itself, it isn't of much use.
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