Expert Blog

Measuring fielding prowess

Cricket usually puts batsmen and bowlers in the spotlight. What about the fielders? Surely, they impact the game in their own way. Let’s find out…

I was watching a re-run of a 1973 Test match between West Indies and England on Star Cricket last night. This was the match in which Garfield Sobers hit the last of his 26 Test centuries, and Keith Boyce and Bernard Julien bowled with fire to take West Indies to a massive innings victory.

It was also the match when Clive Lloyd, then just 28 years old, chased a Keith Fletcher snick to the third man boundary with giant loping strides that would today remind us of a Usain Bolt. Lloyd’s sprint completely captivated commentator Richie Benaud: “Can there be a more beautiful sight on a cricket outfield than Lloyd fielding?” he asked.

One of the great joys of cricket is indeed to watch a fielder in action as he takes incredible catches, dives to stop a certain boundary, or throws down a wicket to pull off an amazing run out. But while we have a munificence of statistical measures to measure batting or bowling ability, fielders are often simply categorized as ‘good’ or ‘bad’, with perhaps only a Jonty Rhodes earning the ‘great’ sobriquet.

How could one measure a fielder’s prowess? A batsman’s prowess is ‘quantifiable’ in terms of runs (and we can multiply these runs by things like strike rate and other multipliers to estimate ‘state of the match’, quality of the opposition’). Likewise, a bowler’s prowess can be measured in terms of wickets taken (and other variables like economy rate and multipliers to estimate the match state and opposition quality). But it is much harder to quantify fielding ability.

Let us see if we can list all fielding accomplishments. The three main ‘good fielding’ criteria are:

# Take a catch (that could involve great reflexes, athleticism, timing or judgment)
# Run out a batsman with a direct throw, or with a very fast and comfortable throw to bowler, wicketkeeper or any other fielder.
# Save runs by stopping a shot and quickly returning the ball.

Since the wicketkeeper is also a fielder, we might add a fourth criterion:

# Effect good stumpings

We now need to decide what should be this quantifiable metric to measure fielding process. Obviously it would make more sense if this metric is comparable to metrics for batting and bowling ability – because we could then add up the ‘batting’, ‘bowling’ and ‘fielding’ metrics to get a single player performance metric.

It seems clear that this metric should be ‘runs’.

Let us suppose that the fielder starts with 0 runs. If he saves 3 runs, it becomes 0+3=3. If he then misfields to give away 2 runs, it would be 0+3-2=1 … and so on. There is, admittedly, a subjective judgment involved here … but it isn’t too hard to judge how many runs were saved or conceded.

For run outs, we might add 30 runs for a direct hit, or suitably distribute these 30 runs between the various fielders that participated in the dismissal process.

For catches and stumpings, we could add 10 runs; for dropped catches or missed stumpings, we could subtract these 10 runs. A more sophisticated scheme could be to add bonus runs, or subtract penalty runs, depending on the quality of the batsman; this increment could, for example, be based on the batting average of the player.

Sadly, as we can already sense, this business can get rather complicated; perhaps that’s why no one has attempted it seriously. But it would still be a very worthwhile exercise to estimate a player’s fielding score, just as we estimate batting and bowling scores.

And we would then have more data to debate how good a fielder Mohammed Azharuddin really was, or, indeed, if Navjot Singh Sidhu was really as bad as he looked.