New performance measure in Cricket

Measuring individual performance of players in Cricket is vital for team selection. The number runs scored by batsmen and wickets taken by bowlers serve as a natural way of quantifying the performance of a cricketer. Traditionally the batsmen and bowlers are rated on their batting or bowling average respectively. However in a game like cricket, it is always important the situation in which one scores the runs or claims a wicket. Scoring runs against a strong bowling line-up or taking wickets against a team with strong batting lineup deserves more credit. A player's average is not able to capture this aspect of the game. In this paper we present a refined method to quantify the 'quality' of runs scored by a batsman or wickets taken by a bowler. A new performance measure for batsman takes into account bowling average of bowler i.e. quality of bowlers he is facing and similarly performance measure for bowler takes into account the batting average of batsman i.e. quality of batsman he is bowling to. Aggregate of individual performance of batsman against each bowler is taken as total performance index of the batsman. And aggregate of individual performance of bowler against each batsman is taken as total performance index of the bowler. Player's ranking can be done on the basis of the total performance index of each player.