World Cup Preview: Australia

Monday, January 31, 2011

Will the recent downslide in Australian cricket affect the defending champions’ World Cup chances? Or will they emerge stronger to win a record fourth consecutive time?

In a build-up to cricket’s biggest event, we’ll take a look at the various contenders at the World Cup and look at their performances coming into to the tournament. We’ll start with defending champions Australia, who despite their troubles in the longer format of the game, are still the number one ODI side in the world today.

For the analysis, we look at performances in the past two years, since that gives us enough of a sample size to pick from and because not too many stars have retired in the past 24 months.

Team Performance

Australia has the highest win-loss ratio of all teams heading in to the World Cup and is the only team to have won at least 40 matches in the past 12 months.

Team	Mat	Won	Lost	NR	W/L
Australia	65	41	21	3	1.95

Batsmen

In analyzing the batsmen, we have looked at the top fifty run-getters across all teams in the past 24 months.  In addition to runs per innings and strike rate, we look at the batting momentum (BM) as an overall measure of batting performance and rank the batsmen in terms of this metric. We use an equivalent metric of bowling efficiency (BE) for the bowlers.

Player	Mat	Runs	Runs per innings	SR	100s	BM	BM Rank
SR Watson	49	2023	41.29	87.34	4	52.6	10
MEK Hussey	55	1966	37.81	91.86	0	49.9	14
RT Ponting	48	1830	38.13	81.08	3	46.2	19
MJ Clarke	45	1696	37.69	73.26	2	42.7	28
BJ Haddin	37	1173	32.58	88.52	2	41.9	30
CL White	53	1629	34.66	79.93	2	41.6	31
TD Paine	24	725	30.21	68.72	1	32.8	45

While Australia has three of the four highest run aggregators over the past two years in Watson, Hussey and Ponting, their highest player in terms of batting momentums is only 10th. However, with five batsmen in the top 30, it’s the balance that makes the Aussies one of the better batting sides heading into the tournament. They’ll hope Mike Hussey is fit in time for the World Cup because he’s been their most consistent batsman after Shane Watson.

Bowlers

Player	Mat	Wkts	Ave	Econ	Bowling Efficiency	BE Rank
DE Bollinger	30	47	23.53	4.42	56.08	8
B Lee	17	29	23.37	4.9	52.75	11
SR Watson	49	53	23.67	4.93	51.87	14
MG Johnson	43	65	28.87	5.15	41.29	25
NM Hauritz	49	52	34.3	4.63	37.32	28

Ryan Harris has been Australia’s most consistent bowler over the past two years but he isn’t even in the squad. Doug Bollinger will be hoping to translate IPL success and recent ODI success into match-winning World Cup performances. Lee is also back and should provide a big boost with his wicket-taking ability.

Overall Assessment

It’s interesting to see Australia have only two players in the top ten across batting and bowling. Shane Watson has proved to be a consistent match-winner, but other than him the Aussies have relied more on teamwork over the past 24 months to pull off over 40 victories. The middle order still looks fragile and that’s an area the Aussies need to sort out if they are to win the Cup for a fourth straight time. A lot will depend on Michael Clarke, especially if Hussey is not fit. If Clarke can find some form in the World Cup then Australia will be a very strong contender. If he doesn’t, then that middle order might crumble in a game or two when the top order fails.

Australia should finish top two in their group, with competition from Sri Lanka for the top spot. That could set up a match-up with England, the West Indies or Bangladesh in the quarters where you’d have to fancy the men from Down Under.  After that, it might be South Africa or India in the semis and that’s where we might see the Aussie World Cup run end.

An alternate look at ODI bi-lateral series

Thursday, January 27, 2011

The recently concluded South Africa-India ODI series made for some compelling viewing. Let’s analyse the battle between the two.

The recently concluded ODI series between South Africa and India had a scoreline of 3-2. Without, in any way, taking the credit away from India for the spirit they showed, their never-say-die approach, their admirable fight against odds and the depletion of the team strength through multiple withdrawals, it is necessary to conclude that the difference between the two teams was wide.

South Africa won the first match by two kilometres, the fourth by a kilometre and the fifth by 250 metres. India won the second match by a metre and the third by 10 metres. Three deliveries, with slightly differing results could have made the scoreline 5-0. For South Africa, the wins were by huge margins while the losses were desperately close.

So I looked at the idea of incorporating win margins (for defending wins) and resources still available (for chasing wins) and working out an overall series analysis. Only the final results are used for this analysis.

Since a win is a win, I allot 10 points for winning a match. This is just an arbitrary number. The other 90 points are allocated between the two teams based on the win margins and resource utilization. The only thing to remember is that the balls remaining is a resource which can be computed in a linear equation (10/300). However, there is a gradually depleting valuation of wickets remaining since the top order wickets are more valuable than the late order wickets (although during India’s chasing innings at Centurion, it was the other way around, the clowns batted ahead of the heroes!!!).

Let us look at the tables.

Match	Won	Margin	Out  of	Win margin/ % res avlble	Win Points		Resource Points		Total Points
					Saf	Ind	Saf	Ind	Saf	Ind
3079	Saf	135	289	46.70	10	0	55.5	34.5	65.5	34.5
3080	Ind	1	190	0.50	0	10	44.8	45.2	44.8	55.2
3082	Ind	2w / 10b	10/300	4.17	0	10	43.0	47.0	43.0	57.2
3084	Saf	48	190	25.26	10	0	50.7	39.3	60.7	39.3
3087	Saf	33	267	12.36	10	0	47.8	42.2	57.8	42.2
								Total	271.8	228.2
								Avge	54.4	45.6

The final numbers reflect the series results quite nicely and are also reflective of the Team strength values which stood at 66 and 58. Of course, South Africa did not have Kallis and India were minus Sehwag, Tendulkar and Gambhir.