One Worm to rule them all and tell you “Who’s winning?”

The Castrol Index worm uniquely measures a team’s overall performance at any point in time and at one glance, tells you who’s ahead on points.

If you tune in to the middle of a football match, one look at the score tells you who’s ahead: United 1-0 Arsenal. Similarly, in basketball, baseball, tennis and most sports in the world, the match score at a point in time tells you who is winning. With cricket, it’s not that easy!

Say Team A scores 250 in their 50 overs, team B is 110 for 2 in 30 overs. Who’s ahead?  My money would be on Team B (Geoffrey Boycott’s money would be in his pocket of course!), but I’m not certain who’s in the box seat. Picking the leader gets even harder in the first half of the match when you have no target. 130/2 in 25 overs could be a good score on a difficult match, a poor one on a flat track and about average on most pitches in the world. But we still don’t have an answer to “who’s winning?”

The reason why it’s hard to answer this question in cricket is because of the nature of the game – two teams compete in entirely different tasks for the first half (one bowls and fields, the other bats) and only after half-time do they reverse roles. Add to that, the lead indicators for winning at a point in time are quite complex – you have runs, wickets and limited overs… not like football where it’s just goals, or basketball where it’s just points scored. There are so many things to keep track of in cricket that it takes a while for a viewer to look at the score and discern the information.

That’s where the Castrol Index worm can help. It “measures” a team’s overall performance at any point in time and tells you who’s ahead on points. It’s like scoring a boxing match with the points updated after every punch. As an illustration, let’s look at the Castrol Index worm from the Australia-West Indies game. Click here if you want to check out the detailed stats from the match. In a nutshell, Australia recovered from 172/7 in 40 overs to post 275 on the back of some powerful Mitchell Johnson hitting. The West Indies were doing okay at 124/1 but were eventually bundled out for 225.

The worm tells you the West Indies were marginally ahead on points in the 40th over of the game. The game turned between overs 44 and 50, when Australia posted 78 runs in 6 overs… That’s when the Aussies pulled away. That’s where the game was won! The Windies came close to the Aussie worm in the first half of the second innings, but the gap was too much to overcome and they stayed behind the whole way, falling further behind at the end with their last 7 wickets falling for 55 runs.

Here’s the thing about this worm – tune in at any point in the middle of the game and you know who’s ahead! No need to process the information in your sub-conscious and do a mental calculation of who you think is ahead – just look at the worm. This, in essence, is the equivalent of your football score, a snapshot of the match which quickly tells you who is more likely to win. The bigger the gap between the worms, the greater the likelihood of the team in front winning.

There have been other worms in cricket, like the one below which tells you how the West Indies did versus the Aussies at a similar point in time.

This is useful in that it tells you the West Indies, after 18 overs, were ahead of Australia after 18 overs. Does that mean West Indies were more likely to win at that point? Probably not, because of Johnson’s craziness at the end of the Aussie innings, but one look at this worm does not tell you that. You still need to mentally factor in the Johnson blitzkrieg into your assessment of the match situation.

Then there’s the run-rate worm which tells you how a side is doing vis-à-vis the required scoring rate.

This is helpful, but does not directly factor in the wickets scenario, i.e. if a side is chasing 300 for victory and is 230 for no loss in 40 overs, they may be behind the required run-rate, but will be heavily  fancied to win. It does not really tell you then “Who’s winning?”

And that really is what the Castrol Index worm attempts to do. The methodology of arriving at a “score”, i.e. the team Castrol Index  at any point in time, is something that has been carefully thought through and factors in various parameters like runs scored, wickets lost, overs remaining and performance in power-plays just to name a few. This calculation ‘might’ require refinement as matches are played, but the intention is quite simple: to tell the viewer who’s ahead at any point in time. So keep an eye on those worms if you want to know “Who’s winning?”