A Region-Based and a Unified Team’s Strength in the Game of Cricket Using Principal Component Analysis (PCA)

Abstract

In sports, one of the primary measures for assessing the performance of a team is their team's strength. The "team's strength" is the combination of various factors of a team such as batting, bowling and fielding strengths. In cricket, it is significant to measure the strengths of the teams across the region/venue because every region has different playing condition which affects their performance. The selectors should be aware of their team's strength against the opposite team from the visiting region so that the team's management, the coach and the captain select a strong combination from his team. A lot of research has done for player's performance measurement, team's selection, team's ranking, etc. but there is no research done in finding the strength of a team across the region. In this paper, we computed the Region-based Team's Strength (RTS) and a Unified Team's Strength (UTS) based on several parameters of a team using Principal Component Analysis (PCA). In addition, we also used the Weighted Average System (WAS) to compute the region-based team's strength. The intuition is to distinguish a stronger and a weaker team across the region. The results show that the proposed method provides quite promising insights into a region-based and a unified team's strength in cricket sports.