More on activity ratings

My last post looked at a batsman's activity rating (their runs per ball not hit to the boundary).

Here I'm going to look at some more figures to do with activity ratings.

I first looked at the last twelve years of test cricket (I'm missing some data for 1997, so I can only look from 1998 onwards). During this time there has been a noticeable increase in batsman's activity ratings. This may be due to a number of factors, perhaps the fielding is better now, so many shots that would have got 4 now get 2's or 3's. Perhaps captains are setting more defensive fields, and so there are more gaps, or perhaps the batsmen are just getting better at scoring ones and twos.

Year	Activity rating
1998	0.234
1999	0.232
2000	0.222
2001	0.238
2002	0.236
2003	0.240
2004	0.251
2005	0.252
2006	0.256
2007	0.266
2008	0.263
2009	0.276
2010	0.277

If you plot it on a graph (and I did because I'm a maths teacher) it has an incredibly linear relationship, with the annual activity rating increasing by about 0.004 per year.

The next thing that I did was to look at the the results for ODI's and twenty twenty internationals. The interesting thing here is that the same trend did not reoccur. The ODI numbers were fairly constant, between 0.4 and 0.5, while the T20 results show not consistency at all (possibly due to the format being so new, and it initially been seen as not very serious).

Year	ODI	T20
1998	0.491	-
1999	0.440	-
2000	0.450	-
2001	0.460	-
2002	0.459	-
2003	0.424	-
2004	0.450	-
2005	0.463	0.650
2006	0.436	0.570
2007	0.447	0.628
2008	0.461	0.560
2009	0.478	0.673
2010	0.480	0.629

The interesting thing here is that 2002 and 2006 both were significantly lower than the other years in ODI's. It might warrant some further investigation as to why this is, although 2006 was the first year that matches between non-test playing nations were considered ODI's, and games involving Bangladesh and Kenya were first recognised in 2002, so these could be contributing factors.

The next thing that I looked at was the ratings for each team for the last 3 years. With the exception of Sri Lanka, the ranking of the teams by activity is the same as the ranking of the teams by the ICC, and (with the exception of Bangladesh and Sri Lanka) it is a very good guide to the ICC ranking points.

Team	Activity rating
Sri Lanka	0.311
India	0.290
South Africa	0.280
England	0.278
Australia	0.276
Pakistan	0.250
West Indies	0.249
New Zealand	0.243
Bangladesh	0.226

I'll draw some more info out of it in my next post.