The World Cup of Cricket starts this week. (C'mon Aussie!) Cricket isn't well-known amongst many of my American friends or colleagues, so when I'm asked about it I usually point them to this video, which gives a good sense of the game:
Actually, this Vox article and this ESPN video do a much better job of describing the game. One thing the ESPN video doesn't mention (besides not listing all 11 ways to be out) is the possibility of a draw. In test match cricket, it's entirely possible for a match lasting five days to end without a winner. The reason is that a test match lasts four innings (each team gets to bat twice), and is also limited to five days. If the time limit ends before both innings are complete, and the trailing team is still at bat, the game is declared a draw. (The idea is that the trailing team may have caught up if only the game could continue.) The strategy for the trailing team, if they don't think they can achieve outright victory, is to instead play for time and go for the draw. (The winner of a test series is the the team with the most wins over five five-day test matches.)
Playing for five days without a definitive outcome can try the patience of the modern sporting fan, so one-day cricket was born. Here, there are just two innings per game, each team is given a fixed number of overs (balls) with which to score, after which the innings is automatically over and the other team has an opportunity to bat. As the name suggests, the game is over in a day and one team or the other will be declared the winner (unless there is an exact tie in scores).
There's an interesting statistical angle here, which is related to interruptions in the game. Let's say we're halfway through the second innings and Australia is at bat with 142 runs to England's 204. Normally, Australia would need to score 63 runs (the "target") to win. Now suppose it starts to rain, and the game is suspended for an hour. To keep the game from running long, Australia will be given fewer overs to bat, and their target will be reduced as well. But the target isn't reduced in exact proportion to the overs removed, to reflect the fact that more runs are generally scored in the latter part of an innings. The exact calculation is based on statistical analysis of cricket games, and is a great example of censored data analysis. (The basic idea is to be able to forecast what the final score would have been in games that are interrupted.) The calculation is known as the Duckworth-Lewis method, named after the two British statisticians that devised it. People often talk about statistics and baseball in the same breath, but this is the only example I can think of where statistical modeling is such an important part of a sport. (If you can think of others, let me know in the comments!)
Well, that's all for this week — I'm off to watch the cricket! See you back here on Monday.
Nice article, David.
You asked about statistical modeling in sports and about good examples.
For me, two examples come to mind immediately.
The first example is Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight's (http://fivethirtyeight.com/) bayesian modeling and predictions of the 2014 football (soccer) world cup. They presented their live forecasts in a rather splendid interactive update at http://fivethirtyeight.com/interactives/world-cup/.
The second example is a slightly less popular sport - cross country skiing. I love this example, because Joran Elias uses R (and ggplot2) really extensively in his analysis and visualisation. See http://www.statisticalskier.com/ for some wonderful examples.
Finally, this is just wrong: http://whohastheashes.com/ :-(
Posted by: Andrie de Vries | February 16, 2015 at 13:25
Interesting article.. D/L method is a well recognized method in cricket world.
I would like to draw your attention to recent research work on cricket analytic.
One good example in Cricket is the decision problem of when to declare during the third innings of a
test cricket match. This has been done by Sports Analytic group at Simon Fraser University, Canada.
Easy-reading-table is provided in the paper as a decision rule to follow if a team wants to draw or win the test match.
http://people.stat.sfu.ca/~tim/papers/declare.pdf
Posted by: Minudil | February 28, 2015 at 00:20
Good article. I also like one day matches m ore than test. As it is more interesting to watch. Apart from test and one day matches, there is 20-20, in which each teams plays 20 overs each, and the winner is decided according to the scores. For more information you also visit http://www.sportsfan.com.au/ online.
Posted by: [email protected] | March 10, 2015 at 00:03
Actually, typically test series are four tests. These days only Ashes series are five tests.
Posted by: Glen Barnett | March 11, 2015 at 19:14