Analyzing World Cup History!
Cricket is the second most popular sport in the world, it has an estimated fan base of 2.5 billion. One of the main events happening in Cricket is the World Cup, once in every 4 years. It is the biggest trophy to have as all the top quality teams participate and fight for the title.
The first world cup happened in 1975 and its been happening since then every 4 years. If your numbers are strong you might have realized that this year is going to be the next World Cup. I have been playing and the following cricket since my childhood days and so given how much the world cup is looked up to and my recent learning from analytics, I decided to analyze the world cup history.
Though the world cup started in 1975 I have done my analysis from 1991 as the first few world cups were not played in the same format as the current ones.
So let us start!
Below were my top 5 analysis from world cup history.
- How dominant were the winning teams
World cup is initially played in a group stage and then later converted to knock out format. Let us see how was the performance of the winning team all throughout the tournament in each worldcup.
Interesting! isn’t it?, all the winning team have had a dominant performance throughout the tournament with Australia having a 100% win record in two world cups. As you can see that the most a winning team has lost are 3 matches, this shows that winning matches right from the start and keeping that consistency is very important in a tournament like a world cup.
2) How important is winning a toss?
Winning or losing a match surely depends upon the team performance but unlike other games like football or tennis where toss doesn’t make much of a difference, in cricket, it sure does like a lot of time the conditions of the pitch changes and also factors like dew or rain come in depending upon the weather conditions. Winning the toss gives you an upper hand as you decide to play in better conditions and the game goes as per your teams planning. But did that actually work in the world cup? How many teams who won the toss actually ended up winning the match? Let us see.
Except in the year 1991, you can see that more than 50% of teams who have lost the toss have ended up winning it, One of the main reason is that world cup is highly competitive and there are many factors that contribute to a teams win of which toss is just one of the factor.
3) To set a target or to a chase one?
While to bat first or to field first is dependent on a pitch and also how the team’s performance has been throughout the series, let us see if batting first or second made a difference in the world cup.
Well, you might see there is not much of a clear picture here as to batting first or field first can help a team. But when you consider individual year for analysis you sure can get some information. Like the 2003 world cup was hosted by South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Kenya wherein the pitch were more bowlers friendly during the second half and hence team batting first ended up getting an advantage, similar case for 2015 world cup hosted by Australia and New Zealand wherein the pitch is hard and the bowl comes on the bat easily so the teams tried to opt for field first as with the time it would have got easier to bat on these pitches.
4) Who is a bigger deal for winning, a Batsman, Bowler or an All rounder?
In a match even though teams would like to get a balance of batsman, bowler and All rounder in order to get a perfect blend. In every match, there is a key player who plays an important role in winning the match. I tried to analyze in all the matches of the world cup which role among batsman, bowler, or all-rounder had a bigger role to play.
Clearly, the Batsman seem to be a game changer for a match. The reason for this is because if a team is batting first batsman have a responsibility of getting a good start and setting a reasonable target and if chasing they have to do the same thing with an added pressure of a particular target to reach. When it comes to bowlers, unlike batsman they have limited overs to perform i.e 10. Even if they bowl well their performance is also dependent upon the other 10 fielders who should not to miss any catch or save a run or a four to back their bowlers. When it comes to all-rounder though their numbers might seem to be less for you but their job is the most crucial they have to come late down the line and finish the game by hitting big shot and even maintain partnership with tail end batsman, also while bowling they have to perform as good as the main bowlers in order to back them and prove to be a perfect blend for the team. Hence even though the numbers don’t go in favor of Bowler and All-rounder their responsibility in itself is complex and requires a team effort for their better performance.
5) Which teams have been popular ones?
Since the world cup is like the main event, getting through semi-finals is also a bigger deal, I tried to find out which were the popular teams and how many times did they make it to the end game.
Clearly, Australia seems to be the most consistent performer, every time they have reached semis they have won and gone up to win the finals 3 out of the 5 times. On the other hand, South Africa seems to be having a curse, they have reached semi-finals 4 times and have lost the semis all the time. The next time you hear someone calling South Africa as chokers, now you would know why!
This brings us to the end of this blog, the entire analysis was performed by scraping data from ESPN Cricinfo and analysis was done in python.
If you need to know behind the scenes for this blog, you can check out the code here. Thank you for your time! :)
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