Pappus' plane - cricket stats

There's an interesting comment by Nesta on my rambly post about batting-first strategies. Essentially, Nesta reckons that Australia have come close to perfecting the art of batting first in 50-over cricket.

Since there's much more scope for variation in batting-first strategies than batting-second strategies (in the latter, everyone know how many runs they need), you might conjecture that this will show up in the results. And it looks like it does.

I considered ODI's between the top eight sides in the 2000's. I split them into day games and day-night games, because the two are markedly different (day games strongly favour the team batting second; day-night games favour the team batting first).

In day games, Australia has won 73% of matches when batting first (ignoring no-results). Second is Sri Lanka at 49% — a whopping 24 percentage points! Australia has won 78% of matches batting second, with South Africa second at 71% — only seven percentage points behind.

In day-night games, batting first: Aus 76%, South Africa 63%; batting second: Aus 62%, South Africa and Pakistan 55%. Once again, a bigger difference in batting first results.

So it does look like Australia have an advantage over their rivals when it comes to batting first, above and beyond their general cricket superiority.

Now for some tables. For each team, I give the number of matches (actually this column includes no-results because I was lazy when doing the copy-paste), the win fraction batting first, the win fraction batting second, and the ratio. First up, day games:

team          mats  1st   2nd   ratio
Pakistan      41    0,40  0,37  0,92
Australia     42    0,73  0,78  1,07
Sri Lanka     53    0,49  0,61  1,25
India         47    0,39  0,58  1,49
West Indies   47    0,29  0,50  1,73
South Africa  39    0,38  0,71  1,85
New Zealand   39    0,29  0,62  2,14
England       38    0,19  0,56  2,94

Only Pakistan does better batting first in day games, but that is probably noise, given where Pakistan is on the next table. Australia is second, with only a small improvement when chasing.

Day-nighters:

team          mats  1st   2nd   ratio
Sri Lanka     59    0,58  0,34  0,59
Australia     70    0,76  0,62  0,82
England       42    0,37  0,31  0,85
South Africa  43    0,63  0,55  0,88
India         50    0,42  0,39  0,92
Pakistan      55    0,58  0,55  0,93
West Indies   22    0,25  0,25  1,00
New Zealand   41    0,43  0,43  1,01

Australia once again second — it's interesting to see Sri Lanka in the top three in both tables as well. Only New Zealand have a better record chasing in day-nighters.

It's worth pointing out that this could do with a more detailed analysis — Australian grounds may be more bat-first-friendly in day-nighters than others, which would explain Australia's high position in the second table.