CAMP: A context-aware cricket players performance metric

Abstract

Cricket is the second most popular sport after soccer in terms of viewership. However, the assessment of individual player performance, a fundamental task in team sports, is currently primarily based on aggregate performance statistics, including average runs and wickets taken. We propose Context-Aware Metric of player Performance, camp, to quantify individual players’ contributions toward a cricket match outcome. camp employs data mining methods and enables effective data-driven decision-making for selection and drafting, coaching and training, team line-ups, and strategy development. camp incorporates the exact context of performance, such as opponents’ strengths and specific circumstances of games, such as pressure situations. We empirically evaluate camp on data of limited-over cricket matches between 2001 and 2019. In every match, a committee of experts declares one player as the best player, called Man of the Match (MoM). The top two rated players by camp match with MoM in 83% of the 961 games. Thus, the camp rating of the best player closely matches that of the domain experts. By this measure, camp significantly outperforms the current best-known players’ contribution measure based on the Duckworth-Lewis-Stern (dls) method.

Keywords:

• Sports analytics
• cricket players’ ratings
• cricket data analysis
• players’ contribution

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 We provide a brief overview of the cricket game with the terminology and rules of the game in Appendix A. Detailed information regarding cricket is also available online https://www.icc-cricket.com/about/cricket/rules-and-regulations/playing-conditions

2 The batting strike rate is the percentage of runs scored from the balls faced by the batter ($\mathit{\text{runs}}/\mathit{\text{balls}}*100$). The bowling economy is the number of runs conceded by the bowler per over ($\mathit{\text{runs}}/\mathit{\text{overs}}$).

3 https://www.espncricinfo.com/

4 https://github.com/sohaibayub/CAMP

5 ICC Men’s odi Players Rankings on October 20, 2019 - https://www.icc-cricket.com/rankings/mens/player-rankings/odi?at=2019-10-20

6 Full Scorecard of NZ vs. PAK 14th Match in ICC Champions Trophy (2006/07) - https://www.espncricinfo.com/series/232694/scorecard/249752/

7 Scorecard: SA vs. IND SB Triangular Tournament(01/02)-https://www.espncricinfo.com/series/8660/scorecard/66107/

8 https://github.com/sohaibayub/CAMP

9 Player of the Series announced by ICC