First-over specialists

August 22, 2017 by Guest User in Team strategy

Tim Wigmore @timwig recently wrote a piece on players specialised in the "art of the first over"... the surprisingly common phenomenon of otherwise part-time bowlers being called on to open the innings for the bowling team. In this post I want to delve a bit deeper into the numbers themselves and apply an analytical lens to establish what these numbers tell us

Ageing curves: Part I

August 15, 2017 by Guest User in Methodology

For teams looking to acquire new players, having a solid understanding of their value is vital. Measuring past performance in T20 can be difficult and measuring future performance is even more challenging. One reason for this is that we need to account for the unrelenting passage of time: younger players improve and older players decline

Ageing curves allow us to understand the overall shape of a typical T20 batsman's career. This post walks through the methodology I have used to calculate an approximate ageing curve for T20 batsmen

Predicting batting performance

July 15, 2017 by Guest User in Methodology

Even as a fairly well-informed fan, it can be hard to find stats in T20 that are as reliable and informative as batting and bowling averages in Test cricket. Mostly, I am guided by strike rates and economy but I still need to contextualise these due to variable scoring rates over the course of a T20 match, as we progress from the Powerplay, through the middle overs, and into the death overs

My aim in this article is to explore which statistics in T20 are most consistent and predictive indicators of future value. On this website, Runs Added and Win Probability Added are often used to evaluate performances but whilst they are good descriptive statistics, they may not be the best predictive statistics

Standards of play across T20 leagues

July 05, 2017 by Guest User in Indian Premier League, Natwest T20 Blast

The world's oldest T20 competition starts again on Friday. The Twenty20 Cup may have been around the longest, but it has since been surpassed by the rest of the world in viewership numbers, attendance, and sponsorship. The ECB have made moves to catch-up, investing a new city-based T20 competition by 2020 but, for now, it is almost certainly true that the T20 Blast also attracts fewer stars than its bigger rivals