Honest Mirror: Quantitative Assessment of Player Performance in an ODI Cricket Match

Cricket is one of the most popular team sports in the world. Players have multiple roles in a game of cricket, predominantly as batsmen and bowlers. Over the generations, statistics such as batting and bowling averages, and strike and economy rates have been used to judge the performance of individual players. These measures, however, do not take into consideration the context of the game in which a player performed. Furthermore, these types of statistics are incapable of comparing the performance of players across different roles. In this paper, we present an approach to quantitatively assess the performances of individual players in single match of One Day International (ODI) cricket. For this, we have developed a new measure, called the Work Index, which represents the amount of work that is yet to be done by a team to achieve its target. Our approach incorporates game situations and the team strengths to measure the player contributions. This not only helps us in evaluating the individual performances, but also enables us to compare players within and across various roles on a common scale. Using the player performances in a match, we predict the player of the match award for the ODI matches played between 2006 and 2016. We have achieved an accuracy of 86.80% for the top-3 positions, which is superior to baseline models and previous works, to the best of our knowledge.