Optimising the first over

October 29, 2017 by Guest User in Team strategy

Six games into the 2017 T20 Blast, Kent were the slowest starters in the competition. Even enduring a maiden first over at home to Gloucestershire. In their seventh game, against Somerset, the team switched things up. Joe Denly moved into the opening slot, with his partner, Bell-Drummond replacing him at the other end

Superficially, the switch appeared to work. In the following eight games, Kent were scoring more runs after 3 balls (+0.6), more runs in the first over (+0.5), and more runs in the PowerPlay (+2.6)

Bowler Tendencies

June 03, 2017 by Guest User in Player Profile

Recently, I have been working on a way to simulate each individual delivery of a T20 cricket match. Part of the challenge is to parse out the impact specific bowlers and batsman have on the outcome of each ball. So I created a spreadsheet which details how many times each player hit sixes, lost wickets, bowled dot balls, conceded wides etc.

It was at this point that the ability to easily make bubble charts distracted me from the task at hand, as I started to look for the statistical outliers in T20 cricket. This post uses some of those bubble charts to explore some of the unique tendencies of certain T20 bowlers

Mystery man is back as an all-rounder

May 14, 2017 by Guest User in Indian Premier League, Player Profile

If you had asked a few years ago, Narine would have been one of my top two picks for best player in the IPL: Gayle with the bat, Narine with the ball. His performance with the ball has slipped in recent seasons but could he possibly have reclaimed his status as one of the most valuable players in T20 having re-invented himself as an all-rounder?