Visualizing Cricket Data with Tableau

What a professional performance by team Australia in CWC 2015! The CWC 2015 has ended but we are going to start our Visualizing Data with Tableau blog series with Cricket. For most of the Indians, Cricket is very close to their heart. In this blog, we will use data to answer a few interesting questions about Cricket with the help of Tableau.

Data

The data has been sourced from howstat.com and formatted appropriately for Tableau’s consumption. This is the first important and often time-consuming step before data visualization and exploration can take place. We have batting data for One Day International (ODI) matches played between years 1971 to 2011 which is close to 60,000 data points. The below table gives you a quick overview of important dimensions and measures present in the dataset.

Data Exploration & Visualization

It is always a good idea to ask questions that you are interested in finding out answers of for using data. It helps in structuring the thoughts and often leads to interesting visualizations uncovering patterns or insights previously hidden. Let us begin.

Who among the Indian batsmen have scored runs at a faster rate?

The above Tree map is generated for Indian ODI players who have scored more than 2,000 runs. Size of the block represents total number of runs scored and colour depicts the strike rate. The more Greener the block, faster the player scores his runs. One can easily conclude that Sehwag, followed by Dhoni, Kapil Dev and Raina are the fastest in scoring runs and Sunil Gavaskar, Sidhu and Laxman have scored their runs at a slower pace as compared to others.

On which grounds bulk of the runs are scored?

Have you ever wondered on which grounds most of runs are scored? The below simple bar chart shows the top five grounds by runs scored. Incidentally, these are also top five grounds by number of matches played which is somewhat intuitive.

Which players have scored most number of ducks?

Murlitharan has scored most number of ducks (41) interestingly followed by Jayasuriya with 34 ducks and McGrath and Wasim Akram with 32 each and Vaas with 30. Again four out of top five are bowlers, which is quite understandable. What is Jayawardane doing at sixth position with 26 ducks?

How do Indian batsmen score and what rate on a given day?

Is there a correlation between day of the match and runs scored and rate at which they are scored? The below graphic shows the average runs scored and average strike rate of Indian players post 2000. It seems like Wednesdays and Fridays are not so good for Indian players both in terms of average runs scored and average strike rate.

How do players compare in terms of average and strike rate?

Below is a scatter plot depicting average runs scored and average strike rate for all the players who have played more than 50 ODIs. The players in top right quadrant are the ones who score fastest as well as more per match as compared to others. One can see that Afridi is the fastest when it comes to score rate but averaging a meagre 20 runs per match whereas Tendulkar, Amla. Hussey, De Villiers score more and faster as well.

This is just the beginning stay tuned for more exciting visualizations and learning with Tableau until then happy data visualization.

About Tableau

Tableau (NYSE:DATA) headquartered in Seattle, Washington has a mission to help people see and understand data. It offers a product portfolio for data visualization focused on business intelligence.

One can visit the official Tableau website to find more details about Tableau and its product offering and features.