Indian Men's or Women's Cricket Team-Which Is Better?

Indian mens or womens cricket teamwhich is better?
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Following the Indian womens cricket teams stellar start to the 2017 Cricket World Cup, an
inevitable question that has come up is whether they are better than the Indian mens cricket
team
Karthik Shashidhar
Following the Indian womens cricket teams stellar start to the 2017 Cricket World Cup, an
inevitable question that has come up is whether they are better than the contemporary mens
cricket team. This question is not from a battle-of-the-sexes perspective, but more from the
view of whether, relative to the current mens team, the womens team is performing better.
This is not an easy comparison to make, since the two teams literally play in different leagues.
We could use the performance in a global tournament as a simple metric, but such tournaments
are one-off and the knockout nature of the later stages of the tournaments implies that the best
team doesnt always win. Another way is to look at the win percentages of the respective
teams, but that doesnt take into account the relative quality of the opposition. Moreover, while
the womens team has had a stellar year (a victory in the Quadrangular Series in South Africa
preceding the strong start in the World Cup), have they really been consistently better than the
mens team?
One good method to evaluate the performance of a team over a long period of time in its own
peer group comes from chess, where for over 50 years now, the Elo ratings have been used to
evaluate and rank chess players. Invented in 1960 by Arpad Elo, a professor who was also a
chess master, the beauty of the Elo rating system is that it not only takes results into account
but also the quality of the opposition.
For example, if a very strong player beats a very weak player, the increase in the formers points
is minimal. On the other hand, if a player defeats or draws with a player who is much stronger,
the change in ratings is much larger. This way, a strong player or team cannot pad the rating by
playing heavily against weak teams (a method certain cricketers have been accused of using to
run up records).
Click here for enlarge
The Elo rating system has not been without debate, not least because of certain underlying
assumptions (such as the probability distribution to be used, as well as the extent to which a
single game should affect the score). However, the system, irrespective of the precise variant
used, has shown itself to be robust enough in chess that recently more sports have started
adopting it. While official world sports bodies have been slow to adapt the Elo, it has found
wide acceptance in board games and among independent sport analysts.
So what do the Elo ratings say about the respective performances of Indias mens and womens
cricket teams? We will use about 10-12 years of data, going as far back as January 2006 (chosen
without loss of generality). We will restrict our analysis to One-Day Internationalswomen
dont play nearly as much in other formatsand look at each and every game played in this
format in this time period. There are several off-the-shelf open source algorithms available to
calculate Elo ratingswe will use the implementation that is part of the PlayerRatings R package
(bit.ly/2uRzJI2).
In order to implement the Elo rating algorithm, we start with each team at the same rating
(2,200 is a standard starting point). We look at each game played in sequence, adjusting the
ratings of the teams following each game. The point adjustment after each game depends upon
the points level of both participating teams just prior to the game. This way, we can get a kind of
current Elo ratings for both the mens and womens game. The two tables in Figure 1 show the
current ratings.
As we can see, the Indian mens team is currently in fourth position based on this analysis, while
the womens team is in third position. These rankings may differ from the official International
Cricket Council rankings, but actual positions and ratings are always a function of the method
chosen, so there is no surprise in this inconsistency.
The current position of the teams rankings, however, is not as interesting as the path that the
teams took to get to their current ratings. For this reason, it makes sense to see how the Elo
ratings of the mens and womens teams have evolved since 2006 (see Figure 2). While the
ratings are not strictly comparable since they are in different leagues, the shape of the graphs is
instructive.
While the current Elo ratings of the two teams (according to our calculations) are not very
different, the shape of the curves gives a clear indication of the attention that the womens
team is receiving. As the graph shows, since early 2015, the rating of the womens team has
been on a near-secular increase. And we can see that since the latter half of last year, there has
been a sharp increase in the womens teams ratings.
The mens team, on the other hand, has been largely consistent in terms of its rating in the last
couple of years, and this is at a much lower level compared with where the team operated in
2013-14. It is, thus, natural that people perceive the womens team is performing better!

Indian Men's or Women's Cricket Team-Which Is Better?

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Indian Men's or Women's Cricket Team-Which Is Better?

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Indian mens or womens cricket teamwhich is better?

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