Friday 28 October 2011

"England vs India" vs "India vs England"

In a series where one team wins comfortably, it can normally be expected that that team would score the most runs. I was interested to see that in the England India series in England that was not the case. In fact, Duckworth and Lewis decided the result of every game except one, and as England was always batting second, they had to score a lot less. England actually faced 421 less deliveries than India, that is about 1 and a half innings normally.

** Trivia Alert **
This was the second ODI series this year where a team got clean swept despite scoring more runs than their opponents - It also happened in the West Indies tour to Sri Lanka.
** Trivia over - back to statistics **

Despite playing shorter innings, England relied on the boundaries less than India, instead getting their runs inside the field. They ran about 58% of their runs, while India ran about 54.5%.

However If we look at the series in India, the results are reversed. India still ran about 54.5% of their runs, but this time England only ran about 51% of their runs. Each series the team that relied the most on boundaries lost the series.

The activity rates were interesting too. In England it was England 0.64, and India 0.54. In India it was England 0.45 and India 0.56. It is interesting, because the difference between the two teams at home and away was largely the running between wickets and fielding. Both of them scored a similar number of boundaries in either series.

It leads me to question if it is harder to judge a run in home conditions or away conditions across the board, so this was the next thing I looked into. Here are some numbers from the last 10 years:

teamrun runs (rr)run outs (ro)balls faced (bf)rr per robf per ro
home119488682275772175.2404.4
away117718746281803157.8377.8


Now this is a quite significant difference, about 10%. It certainly brings up questions for further analysis. It would be interesting to see if this is true for other modes of dismissal, and which teams have the biggest difference between their home figures and their away figures.

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