A Study of Batting out-of-form in One-Day International Cricket

Abstract

When a batter scores low in a series of innings, lack of self-confidence generated as a result coupled with poor batting strategies may lead to scoring even lower in the immediately preceding innings. In a team game like Cricket, the out-of-form status of a batter may affect the outcome of the game. This motivated us to explore a statistical method to detect batting inconsistency of a batter in Cricket. One-sided Exponentially weighted moving average (EWMA) control chart was employed due to its evident capability in rapid detection of upward or downward changes in the process mean. The analysis of this study considered ODI batters, who were engaged in the sport during the past decade belonging to seven different cricket nations. An observation of out-of-control state in a control chart was recognized as a batter experiencing an out-of-form performance phase and basic sensitizing rules were utilized to detect non-random and unnatural variation which were explained as warning signals of batting inconsistency. As a demonstration of the proposed method, EWMA control charts of a few popular batters were presented and analyzed which revealed some interesting findings related to their ODI career performance. When an occurrence of a clear downward sequence was detected in the control chart, it was decided that the batter has been out-of-form during that phase. The proposed method can be utilized to dynamically evaluate career batting performance through detection of out-of-form status of batsmen using their recent past scores and this would facilitate effective player selection for the next game.