Friday, August 20, 2010

Correlating Type of Bowler and Strokes used by Batsman

Most commonly used strokes by batsman are as follows:


  • Straight Drive/Square Drive
  • Square Cut/late Cut
  • Hook & Pull
  • Sweep
  • Glance
Now one can compare these strokes of the batsman with the type of bowler. The representation will look something as shown below:

## Drives Cuts Leave/Block Sweep Leg Glance Pull & Hook
Fast Bowler
Medium Pace Bowler
Off-spinner
Leg –Spinner
All ypes of Bowler

Thursday, August 5, 2010

Correlating Type of Bowler by scoring areas of a batsman

This is very important part of SWOT analysis of a batsman. Understanding the scoring distribution of batsman. Lets consider a batsman

## Off-side On-Side
Fast Bowler 193 257
Medium Pace Bowler 131 156
Off-spinner 156 243
Leg –Spinner 78 276
All types of Bowlers 558 932

We see that he is predominantly an onside player as shown below:

## Off-side On-Side
Fast Bowler 42.89% 57.11%
Medium Pace Bowler 45.64% 54.36%
Off-spinner 39.10% 60.90%
Leg –Spinner 22.03% 77.97%
All types of Bowlers 37.45% 62.55%

The batsman scores 62% of runs on-side. More we find that spinners are his heavy target on-side. The best strategy is to attack this batsman on the off-side and expose his weakness. From a batsman perspective he needs work on his off-side.

Also we see the distribution by bowlers on onside and offside (Column percentages take here)

## Off-side On-Side
Fast Bowler 34.59% 27.58%
Medium Pace Bowler 23.48% 16.74%
Off-spinner 27.96% 26.07%
Leg –Spinner 13.98% 29.61%

Here it is clear he is comfortable with pacemen on off-side and spinners on leg side. Using this information opposition can plan bowling and fielding attack for the batsman.

One can go even a step-further and try to understand on-side and off-side areas.

Offside can be broken down into

1. Third Man

a. Deep

b. Square

c. Fine

d. Short

2. Mid-off

a. Short

b. Deep

c. Silly –Mid-off

3. Long-Off

a. Straight

b. Wide

4. Cover

a. Short

b. Extra

c. Deep-Extra

d. Deep

5. Point

a. Backward

b. Deep Backward

c. Forward

d. Cover

e. Deep

f. Deep Cover

g. Silly Point

6. Gully

7. Slip

a. First

b. Second

c. Third

d. Leg

e. Fly

Even Onside can be broken into multiple-categories like:

1. Long-on

a. Straight

b. Wide

2. Mid-on

a. Deep

b. Short

3. Mid-wicket

a. Deep

b. Deep Forward

c. Short

4. Square Leg

a. Forward

b. Backward

c. Deep

d. Deep Forward

e. Deep Backward

5. Fine Leg

a. Short

b. Deep

c. Square

d. Backward Short Leg

e. Long

f. Straight

6. Leg Gully

SWOT analysis of Batsman (Strength, Weakness, Opportunities and Threats of Batsman):

It is very important to understand Strength, Weakness, Opportunities and Threats from a batsman perspective. This we can call as SWOT of a batsman. SWOT can help:

1. Understanding batsman capability by scoring regions on the field

2. Understanding batsman strokes on the field

3. Understanding batsman dismissals by category

All these can be done with the nature and type of bowling attack under consideration.

Advantages of SWOT:

One can understand the strength and weakness of batsman in-terms of scoring, strokes and dismissals. This can help

1. Batsman to improve his playing strategy

2. Opposition to fine tune bowling and fielding tactics

Tuesday, August 3, 2010

Dimensions to Evaluate a Batsman

In our previous posts, we defined median, mode and standard deviation of players. In this post, i want to bring to attention multiple dimensions along which a player can be evaluated. Here are they !

i. by Position (Opening, First Down, Second Down, etc)

ii. by Bowler (Fast/Medium/Spin)

iii. by opposition (Aus, WI, NZ, Pak, Ind, SL , Eng, SA etc)

iv. by Location (Home/Abroad)

v. by outcome of matches (Winning/Losing)

vi. by position of the field (on-side/off-side)

vii. by Innings (Batting First/Chase)

viii. by stage of the innings (Power-Play, Middle-overs, Slog)

ix. by Boundaries, Singles, Twos, Threes

x. by current form indicators (Last 5/10 matches, Previous Tournament) - This is very important to assess the "current form". For example mean, median, mode and standard deviation of player in last 5 matches/10 matches/previous tournament.

All these dimensions can be used along with mean, median,mode and standard deviation. For example: Mean, Median,Mode and Standard Deviation of Sachin Tendulkar for Australia, England, WI, Pak,SL,Eng and SA teams will help us understand the performance of Sachin across all these teams. We can compare these numbers with overall mean, median,mode and standard deviation score for sachin. It helps understand against which teams he has performed well and which teams he hasn't matched the average figures.

Sunday, August 1, 2010

COMPARISON OF PLAYERS in-terms of MEAN, MEDIAN, MODE AND STANDARD DEVIATION

Lets us consider previous example and see how we can compare 2 batsmen (Player A and Player B) based on mean, median, mode and standard deviation


Player A

Player B

Mean Score

20.57

20.57

Median Score

20

24

Mode Score

20-24

25-29

Standard Deviation of Player

14.47

5.31

Traditionally cricket statistics will tell Player A and Player B are same because batting average (Mean score) is same. However data shows that Player B has higher Median and Mode score compared to Player A. Also Standard deviation of player A is 3 times as much as Player B, showing that Player B is more consistent.

Using these statistics we can conclude Player B is better in-terms of consistency and performance.