How data drives the way cricket is served

People don’t chase cricket now. It’s cricket that is running behind fans with data.

May 03, 2015 01:35 am | Updated 01:36 am IST - CHENNAI/BENGALURU

Many decades ago, radio commentary used to be the best way to catch the cricket action. Then came live television. It may now well be the age of data, delivered live over smartphones and shareable on social media.

Cricket analytics and content firms, which came up in recent years to serve the burgeoning needs of professional teams in an era of non-stop cricket, now recognise they have a new audience to serve. This, even as they are finding newer ways to help teams make better decisions and players iron out their grey areas. “Today’s kids are born with smartphones, so we have to change the way cricket is served. The way cricket is consumed has also changed,” says S. Ramakrishnan, founder director of SportsMechanics, a sports analytics firm.

Mr. Ramakrishnan was formerly a video analyst with the Indian cricket team. Sachin Tendulkar’s wife, Anjali Tendulkar, and Virender Sehwag’s wife, Aarti Sehwag, are shareholders in SportsMechanics.

“Gone are the days when people chased cricket. It is cricket that is running behind fans with data and scorecards,” Mr. Ramakrishnan says. His idea is to keep cricket fans engaged without their having to watch it live, which is possible because of mobile Internet. So a fan travelling in a bus will not only be able to have an informed opinion about a match currently taking place but also can be in a position to share that immediately on social media.

This IPL season, SportsMechanics is working with Mumbai Indians, Chennai Super Kings and Royal Challengers Bangalore to help increase engagement with fans by serving up analytics and infographics. Mr. Ramakrishnan says the banter in social media starts one hour before a game commences and tapers down well after it is over. A data insert for Chennai Super Kings received 30,000 hits on Facebook in just one hour.

“The fans will start consuming more and develop stickiness once they get used to analytics-driven fan engagement,” he says.

SportsMechanics now wants to hive off the cricket part of the business into a separate “cricket cloud.” In IT terminology, cloud means making available services over the Internet.

“Through data and facts, we can tell about the game today. We have a mix of data scientists and domain experts,” says Mr. Ramakrishnan, who is all set to release free apps in a month. Harish Bijoor, brand expert and CEO of Harish Bijoor Consults Inc, says, “With data, the fan is going to be made more intelligent, interactive and more participative. It makes the game more granular.” But, he says, “Anecdotally, research and analysis of data is only as good as the entity which does it. So you ought to be cautious.”  

On the ground, data is on the ball

The attempt to reach newer cricket audiences in newer ways is happening even as a slew of firms are now trying to slice and dice cricket data. Two such firms are CricHQ, in which former New Zealand cricketer Stephen Fleming is a director, and Cricket 21.

They, along with SportsMechanics, a sports analytics firm, are in the business of providing cricket analytics of many kinds, including performance analysis, predictions and player impact analysis. Professional teams are their primary clients.

“Data is the most important point for any sport. Presently, there are lot of tools available to do that,” says Dinesh Kumble, who used to be a director at Stump Vision, a Bengaluru-based early player in cricket analytics but which had to shut shop because of lack of funding. “With big data now, we can do much deeper analysis of match, patterns and performance,” he says.

In its heyday, Stump Vision’s clients included the BCCI, the South African Broadcasting Corporation and Wisden. CricHQ, Cricket 21 and ESPNCricinfo could not be reached for comments.

The cricket analytics craze has bitten academics too. Sports analytics is all about going beyond the simple issue of averages, says Nandan Sudarsanam, who teaches at the Department of Management Studies, IIT-Madras. “There will always be some uncertainty attached to a bowler or a batsman’s average performance. What’s critical is to know how they will perform in a given circumstance. Who do you pick to bowl your final over? Analytics can help a lot with such questions.”

The IIT-Madras has now set up an inter-disciplinary lab for data sciences to get a slice of the action.

One of the ongoing student projects is an effort to come up with a set of metrics that can help IPL teams to choose the best 11 players for a particular day from the pool of 30 available players. “A team’s composition could be heavily reliant on the opponent’s strengths and weaknesses,” Mr. Sudarsanam says.

Being an academic institution also offers scope to pursue questions that could benefit the industry as a whole, instead of just one team, he says. “What should be the ticket price, for example, to ensure fewer empty seats in the stadium? Analytics can answer such commerce-related questions.”

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