How India bottled the 2022 T20 World Cup | Part 1: Introduction

Introduction

T20I cricket. It is the youngest of the three siblings of mother cricket, yet it is the format that has revolutionised the game beyond recognition. It finishes relatively quick, it can often produce enthralling last ball finishes and it is the format that lends itself most to upsets. Because of its wide appeal to a huge audience, it receives the most attention from broadcasters, therefore the most money, and with it the most analytical scrutiny. Over the past 10 years, we have been in the Moneyball era of cricket where cricket analysts play a vital part in any professional team to ensure that their team is aware of every small detail that can give them an advantage, in what is an incredibly fickle format. However sometimes the best plans, considered analysis and the most intelligent thinkers in the game can be caught out by incredible individual acts of brilliance, bad umpiring decisions or simply not having the rub of the green.

For example, in the recently concluded T20 World Cup, the team with a win/loss ratio of 3 across 2022 lost to a team with a win/loss ratio of 1.4. Granted the latter team went on to win the T20 world cup, and the former team, India, had played admirably up to that point, but the question remains. WHY CAN’T INDIA WIN A DAMN TOURNAMENT?

Where did India go wrong? Where did it go right for England? Is winning a T20 World Cup just dependent on winning the most tosses? Is it having the best luck on the day? Do months of hard analysis and carefuly thought out plans mean absolutely nothing to the T20 cricket gods? Maybe. But also, maybe England were just the better team and the author of this blog is too bitter to admit it.

That is why I decided to do a deep dive on India’s performance at the T20 World Cup. The question I wanted to answer was this: What went wrong for India at the 2022 T20 World Cup?

To do this, I set out to do analysis on the type of cricket India had been playing in T20s, and then compare it to England to see if India can learn a thing or two from them.

This is the first in a series of articles where I walk through my methedology for picking apart India’s failed 2022 T20 World Cup campaign. To complete my analysis, I use a machine learning method known as clustering to understand the different types of T20 matches that are played out. In this introduction article, I will set out my methedology and my hypothesis on why India failed at the T20 WC. In the next article I will walk through how I prepared my data set for clustering. The third article will cover the results of the clustering and outline the six major match types that the machine learning model returned. In the final article, I will use these clusters to describe the story of Indian cricket up to the end of the T20 World Cup, comparing them against England.

Methodology

The following outlines the steps that I took to complete the projects:

1. Obtain data
2. Prepare data for clustering
3. Create clustering model using K-Means Clustering algorithm
4. Define Clusters
5. Analyse India’s T20 matches with the defined clusters

Hypothesis

From the 2016 T20 World Cup onwards, India had strong performance in T20Is built on the philosophy of batting deep into the innings and scoring the bulk of their runs in the back ten overs. One of the top three would anchor the innings whilst the remaining batters played around them. In the 2021 WC, India fell woefully short of expectations by crashing out of the group stage, and this was mainly down to India not being able to recover from poor starts due to early wickets and a lack of intent from the batters. They changed this around in 2022, leading into the 2022 WC, where they looked to be considerably more agressive. They then proceeded to win 30 out of the 40 T20 matches they played this year. But then, we get to the 2022 T20 World Cup. My hypothesis is that India veered away from the aggresive intent they had decided to make the bedrock of their T20 cricket, in favour of the more traditional method of being circumspect in their run scoring at the beginning of the innings, and then exploding at the death.

My hypothesis is that India veered away from the aggresive intent they had decided to make the bedrock of their T20 cricket in favour of the more traditional method of being circumspect in their run scoring at the beginning of the innings, and then exploding at the death.

In this article, I have introduced my project to understand why India’s T20 World Cup ended in another failure. I discussed the methodology I will be using as well as outlining my hypothesis. I set up the idea of creating clusters for T20 matches, and in the next article, I will discuss how I prepared the data for clustering, so that we can begin our journey of dissecting India’s world cup campaign.