Data analytics and Sports
Data analytics is being used by businesses to analyze data and for other purposes but the effect of data analytics can be seen on other platforms as well such as sports.Data analytics and sports are going hand-in-hand for some time now. Sports such as cricket and baseball use data analytics extensively. Data Analysis, when applied to a player, can record a player’s information and suggest improvements, give a breakdown of the information in different formats, provide graphs and other useful analytic interfaces that will help compare the information and more. The analytics of data of professional cricket is called Criclytics.
How Data analytics in cricket work?
Imagine the amount of data that will be generated every day for 365 days with the ball by ball information of 5,31,253 cricket players in close to 5,40,290 cricket matches at 11,960 cricket grounds across the world.
Keeping track of each of these players’ performances, intake of calories, training levels, interaction with fans, and much more in the pursuit of improved performance on the pitch is where Criclytics will come into play.
How Criclytics help?
This can be best explained with an example. Imagine a batsman who is not doing so well. If data analytics is implemented to the batsman’s practice and past performance it will provide information on what kind of deliveries the batsman is not doing well on, In what kind of pitches batsman gives his best performance. It will give graphs and charts of his performance in different conditions hence he can easily find out in which area he is lacking and can work on that to improve his performance.
The same is applied not only to individual players but also to other factors like pitch information, climate, pitch length, ground information (helps in field placement and also helps batsman access which side is the closest one to the boundary line as the pitch is not necessarily always in the center.
The insights that one can derive from Criclytics equips broadcasters, players, and fans with enough background information to make the right decisions about the team’s performance.
CCTV cameras, wearable computers, and sensors are a few of the progressive high-tech devices that are used on the field, nowadays, to capture and monitor the rampant volumes of cricket data.
Many teams are using this practice and even hiring a team just for the sake of data analytics. Hiring a dedicated analytics team empowers the team’s captain to take appropriate decisions since he is now using the necessary statistical tools that can predict the probability of individual player’s performance and what can be done to improve overall team’s performance. Each of the player’s performance is influenced by the alteration and the combination of a list of independent factors like the opponent’s weaknesses and strengths.
To deal with this, the data analytics crew analyzes and accrues the past data on the scores, the player profiles, the player performances, and others to come up with an ideal team composition and answer questions like who to pick for the last over.
What businesses can learn from it?
As in case of professional cricket where data is being used to show players where they can improve their performance and forecast future performance of the players same as in the case of businesses. Data analytics can be used to look for the shortcomings of the business and ways to improve it. Every business has a ton of data but they don’t know what to do with it. Now there are tools available in the market that can analyze these data and unravel it in a structured format that can be easily comprehended by the business
