A new way to evaluate cricketers

It may be somewhat surprising when you think about how, in over 13 decades of cricket’s well-documented existence, we only have one known way to judge cricketers — batting and bowling averages. The void that this leaves is quite huge.

Measuring cricketers only through their averages is liable to give skewed and unreliable results. Averages don’t take into account the context that each performance came in, that is, factors such as the opposition’s strength, state of the pitch and the match, speed of scoring (often a key momentum-swinger, even in Tests) whether the wickets taken by a bowler are top or lower-order wickets and so on.

Yet we rely only on averages because there is no other alternative. But that might not necessarily be the case for too long now.

At the ICC’s History Conference held late last month (July 22 and 23) to mark its centenary year, a new device to evaluate cricketers called the Impact Index was unveiled. The device has been developed by a team from the Mumbai-based cricket website HoldingWilley.com. It measures the contribution of a cricketer in a match and series context, and therefore, presents a more accurate picture of a cricketer’s value.

The study presented also included a ranking of the 50 most impactful Test cricketers of all time, in which Graeme Smith is ranked seventh, ahead of stalwarts such as Lara, Richards, Tendulkar, Dravid, Dennis Lillee and many more. A list of the complete rankings is available here.

The Impact Index was conceived and developed by Jaideep Varma (founder of HoldingWilley), Jatin Thakkar (stats editor/writer at HoldingWilley) and, ahem, yours truly.

Impact Index treats the match as the battle and the series as the war (one innings is then merely a phase in a battle, however significant). This method provides context to the cricketing performance — the state of the match and the series, the strength of the opposition and pitch conditions. Further, it also accounts for additional impact the player may have had in roles such as captaincy and wicket-keeping, while also providing for the longevity of a cricketer. For more details on the methodology, click here.

The interesting thing then is how it manages to bring cricketers and cricketing performances from across numerous different variables such as era, teams, conditions etc into a single common platform, and boils it down to one numerical value. So, for the first time, we have a common spectrum to view bowlers, batsmen, all rounders, cricketers playing on uncovered pitches, flat-track bullies, spinners, seamers, openers, middle-order players and so on, while still accounting for these seemingly intangible differences in the context to their performances.

The exercise ranking the 50 most impactful cricketers of all time throws up several surprises, and not least of them is Graeme Smith. Smith’s position in these ratings puts a tangible frame on a lot of his achievements that have seldom being weighed correctly. He has captained South Africa in 69 out of the 77 Tests he has played, and has taken South Africa to the number one spot in the ICC’s official Test rankings. He has anchored some of the most phenomenal fourth innings run chases in modern cricket, opening the innings and leading on from the front. The current South African team is a strong contender to be rated the best team in operation, and Smith is clearly the chief architect of it, not just with the bat but also as captain.

Bradman, Sobers, Imran Khan, Richard Hadlee, Muralitharan and Warne fill up the first six spots preceding Smith. There are several other eye-openers in the list — Bob Simpson at number 9, Richie Benaud at number 11 and Kumar Sangakkara at number 12. Studying closely the achievements of these players shows how distorted broad judgements on cricketers based on averages and general observations can get.

Impact Index as a tool can be used for everyday cricket coverage across all three formats of the game through series reviews, determining the man of the match/series/tournament and so on. For instance, in South Africa’s 2-1 victory against Australia in Australia late last year, Graeme Smith was adjudged the man of the series. It emerges that while Graeme Smith’s Impact Index including his role as a captain is 11.17, whereas JP Duminy’s Impact Index in the series is 11.67. It is of even more relevance in T20, where averages mean even little.

Cricket as a sport lends itself to more qualitative analysis than most other sports. The lack of a clear way to evaluate players across eras and teams under a single common denominator is a gaping hole in the way we understand the sport. Perhaps, this will change now.