Release velocities and bowler performance in cricket

ABSTRACT

There is a widespread notion in the cricketing world that with increasing pace the performance of a bowler improves. Additionally, many cricket experts believe faster bowlers to be more effective against lower order batters than bowlers who bowl at slower speeds. The present study puts these two ubiquitous notions under test by statistically analysing the differences in performance of bowlers from three subpopulations based on average release velocities. Results from one-way ANOVA (and its modified versions), for international test matches, reveal faster bowlers to be performing better, in terms of Average and Strike-rate, but no significant differences in the Economy rate and Dynamic Bowling rate. Faster bowlers were found to be more effective in taking wickets of lower and middle order batters as compared to bowlers with less pace. However, there was no statistically significant difference in performance of Fast and Fast-Medium bowlers against a top-order batter.

KEYWORDS:

• Bowling performance
• cricket
• batting order
• ANOVA
• post hoc analysis

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Akash Malhotra http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3922-8144

Shailesh Krishna http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4226-6355

Notes

1. To understand cricketing terminologies, refer Wanderers [15].

2. To understand construction of ball, see Law 4 of the Laws of Cricket.

3. Refer Law 42 of the Laws of Cricket.

4. In cricket, over is a set of six balls bowled consecutively by a single bowler from one end of a cricket pitch.

5. To know more about test matches, refer Swartz [14].

6. Müller et al. [12] demonstrates that expert batters are better able to judge ball trajectories prior to and post-bounce.

7. Middle order (4–7) comprises of four batters as opposed to top (1–3) and lower (8–10) order which comprises of three batters each.