Babar Azam’s T20 Journey — A data Story
Cricket is 2nd most watched sport in the world, with T20 being the most popular format. The T20 world-cup 2022 has just begin with in Australia this week. I though this would be a good time to publish this data analysis of one of the best batsman in the world ‘Babar Azam’ who plays for Pakistan.
The data I used is from https://cricsheet.org/ , Cricsheet provides ball-by-ball match data for most cricket matches. I downloaded all Matches played by Pakistan which you can get from here https://cricsheet.org/downloads/
The data is available in YAML and JSON format, I choose to go ahead with JSON, it provides a JSON files for each match with various details from venue, toss, match type to what happened on each delivery bowled.
First step was to extract all files and filter out all matches where Babar Azam was part of the playing eleven. From These matches I extracted all bowls played by Babar, along with stats of the match like outcome, toss winner, venue etc.
This latest match in this analysis was played by Pakistan on 2nd October 2022.
Babar Azam did his T20I debut on Wednesday 07 September 2016 in a Match against England played in Old Trafford. Babar Scored a 15 not out and Pakistan won the match.
Fun Fact: Hasan Ali also did his Debut in this same Match.
Babar has Played a total of 87 T201 innings scoring a total of 3039 runs at batting average of 44.69 runs per inning. In cricket a batting average is total runs scored divided by total number of times the player got out. Babar got out a total of 68 times in these 82 innings.
For our rest of analysis we’ll exclude the no result innings.
Babar has played most T20Is against England and West Indies.
The top 15 bowlers Babar has faced in T20Is, only top 15 shown. As expected the top 2 bowlers are from the top 2 team he has played against, England and West Indies.
This plot above excludes singles and dot balls, Babar has scored over 300 4s, and 50 6s in T20Is.
How Does he Get Out?
He is Most commonly caught out, and the second is bowled. Very rarely gets run out or stumped.
Who Got Babar’s Wicket the Most times?
Adil Rashid from England has taken Babar’s wicket 3 times, the most any bowlers has in T20Is.
Most Boundaries Against which Bowler?
David J Willey from England has conceded most boundaries from Babar Azam, Beuran E Hendricks and Tabraiz Shamsi at 2nd and 3rd from South Africa.
Most Dot Balls Against a Bowler?
Interestingly, some bowlers he hit for most boundaries are also the among the bowlers that bowled most dot balls against him.
Batting Average Against a Team
Highest Average is against Namibia and Scotland as he has only played 1 game against both of these. The teams where he has played more than 5 games and has an avg less than 30 are Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.
Strike Rate
Strike rate is relatively consistent, we can see he hasn’t preformed good against Bangladesh and Sri Lanka overall. Everywhere else his strike rate ranges from 120–140.
Batting Average over time
Lets Have a look at how His Batting Average has changed over time, For this plot I have excluded his first few matches, as in first few matches the avg isn’t really a good measure of performance.
As is with all good players they start with a very high Average so Did Babar, he had a bad period in late 2017 and early 2018, where hi average dropped to 40s, he rose to fame early 2018 and had a consistent average till end of 2019. His recent average has dropped a bit from last year, but as time goes on and the more game he plays this average become less variable.
Total Runs in T20I
Babar has now 3000+ T20I runs, there are only 6 people who have achieved this, and he reached this record in 87 innings matching the record of Virat Kohli.
For now this is it for the analysis, I really wanted some more data on kind of bowl bowled, its speed and the shot played, this would help in getting into some real nitty gritty of how he plays. If anyone reading has any thing that I should uncover let me know. This analysis of just Babar doesn’t really show how good or bad player he is, but a comparative analysis with some of the other great players would be very informative. I intent to publish a follow up analysis where I compare these stats with some other batsmen and see how he ranks up against them.
