Tuesday 4 January 2011

More on activity ratings

My last post looked at a batsman's activity rating (their runs per ball not hit to the boundary).

Here I'm going to look at some more figures to do with activity ratings.

I first looked at the last twelve years of test cricket (I'm missing some data for 1997, so I can only look from 1998 onwards). During this time there has been a noticeable increase in batsman's activity ratings. This may be due to a number of factors, perhaps the fielding is better now, so many shots that would have got 4 now get 2's or 3's. Perhaps captains are setting more defensive fields, and so there are more gaps, or perhaps the batsmen are just getting better at scoring ones and twos.

YearActivity rating
19980.234
19990.232
20000.222
20010.238
20020.236
20030.240
20040.251
20050.252
20060.256
20070.266
20080.263
20090.276
20100.277


If you plot it on a graph (and I did because I'm a maths teacher) it has an incredibly linear relationship, with the annual activity rating increasing by about 0.004 per year.

The next thing that I did was to look at the the results for ODI's and twenty twenty internationals. The interesting thing here is that the same trend did not reoccur. The ODI numbers were fairly constant, between 0.4 and 0.5, while the T20 results show not consistency at all (possibly due to the format being so new, and it initially been seen as not very serious).

YearODIT20
19980.491 -
19990.440 -
20000.450 -
20010.460 -
20020.459 -
20030.424 -
20040.450 -
20050.4630.650
20060.4360.570
20070.4470.628
20080.4610.560
20090.4780.673
20100.4800.629


The interesting thing here is that 2002 and 2006 both were significantly lower than the other years in ODI's. It might warrant some further investigation as to why this is, although 2006 was the first year that matches between non-test playing nations were considered ODI's, and games involving Bangladesh and Kenya were first recognised in 2002, so these could be contributing factors.

The next thing that I looked at was the ratings for each team for the last 3 years. With the exception of Sri Lanka, the ranking of the teams by activity is the same as the ranking of the teams by the ICC, and (with the exception of Bangladesh and Sri Lanka) it is a very good guide to the ICC ranking points.

TeamActivity rating
Sri Lanka0.311
India0.290
South Africa0.280
England0.278
Australia0.276
Pakistan0.250
West Indies0.249
New Zealand0.243
Bangladesh0.226


I'll draw some more info out of it in my next post.

2 comments:

  1. Hats off to you sir for doing this - I've got no idea where you are getting useable data from! Is it a trade secret??

    When did the changes to the rules regarding powerplays come in? Not sure whether that could be a factor in seeing a drop or not though.

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  2. oooh - good thought it could have been a factor. I get the data from statsguru on cricinfo. It takes a bit of fiddling to get it to give me the information that I want, then I compile the different lists in excel.

    I have a theory that the powerplays often slow down teams more than they accelerate them. I've no idea how I can prove this easily though - the only way I can think of is too much like hard work.

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