Heading into most cricket series, there’s always a lot of talk about the impact of a team playing in unfamiliar surrounds.
Bouncy wickets versus dustbowls. Overflowing stands filled with worshippers versus barmy armies. Hot and dry versus cool and wet.
Most of the time, a team has to be playing out of their minds to ever be considered a chance to win away. The figures suggest there’s something to it, too.
Home teams have won 57 per cent of One Day Internationals held between a team at home versus a team playing away. That suggests there’s some kind of advantage.
Australia and New Zealand are hosting the 2015 ICC World Cup – the former likely to have been anointed favourites for the tournament regardless of where it was played, while the latter rated as a dark horse in part because they will play all but the final in their home country.
But does advantage exist in World Cups? A cursory glance gives you a definitive “not really”.
Just one team with a home field advantage has won the ICC Cricket World Cup since 1992 – India in the last edition of the tournament. Sri Lanka won the 1996 edition which was jointly hosted by themselves, India and Pakistan, but the final itself was held in Pakistan.
That’s the whole tournament, though. Overall, teams that play on a home ground during the World Cup are a combined 52-27-4 (wins-losses-tied/no result) – good for a winning percentage of 62 per cent – around five percentage points, or nine per cent, better than the overall rate of homevictories.
This says two things. One, its likely that playing a World Cup in your familiar surrounds plays a role in your chances of victory. But more importantly, two, once you make it to the pointy end the vagaries of cricket, and a fair dose of luck, probably play a more important role in winning.
Fortunately, there’s a way we can tease out a statistical advantage, using a technique that’s been applied to other sports with a couple of tweaks to make it work for cricket, using run rates.
The two biggest wrinkles that need to be ironed out are that there are two very different phases to the game: setting the total in the first innings, and chasing it down in the second.
The difference being the maximum runs to be scored in a second innings are based on whatever is scored in the first. So we need to compare each innings separately.
The other one is that we can’t just compare runs, because not every game is played on a consistent number of balls or phases, like say football which runs for 90 minutes. To that, we compare run rates rather than total runs scored.
Right, now that’s out of the way, what does home field advantage work out at?
For ODIs since the 1992 World Cup, sides have had an advantage of +8 runs in the first innings, and +3 runs in the second innings, by virtue of their home field advantage. Combined, you can expect a side playing in their home country to have a 5.5 run lead before a ball has been bowled.
That doesn’t sound like a lot, until you consider that between 1992 and 2014, 60 per cent of games where both sides made it into the 49th over were decided by five runs or less.
Home field advantage matters. Who has world cricket’s best?
It won’t come as too much of a shock, but in ODIs it’s a sub-continental team which has the best home field advantage. Pakistan have a +16 run differential on average when playing on their home decks versus away, which is far and away the largest of cricket’s full member nations.
But that’s only on their native land. If you include the UAE as Pakistan’s home away from home, their advantage dips to a less-intense +10.3 – which suggests there’s less of an advantage playing at a more neutral venue.
The next three teams are all affiliate nations: Ireland (+12.4), Canada (+11.6) and The Netherlands (+11.5). That seems to pass the smell test – these are nations who are largely made up of amateurs who aren’t as well versed in travelling around the globe to ply their trade.
From here we’re back to the full members, with India (+10.3) and South Africa (+10.2) the other two nations with double digit advantages. India’s advantage is mostly driven by its tendency to score 16.1 more runs in the first innings on its ho decks (versus +5.0 in the second innings), while South Africa also looks to have a better time of it batting first at home (+13.1 versus +7.5 in the second innings).
England also has a fairly sizeable home field advantage at +9.1. From there, it’s a bunch of teams that are at or around the average. Here’s the data for sides that have played at least 30 ODIs.
Advantage (runs)
Australia -4.5
Bangladesh 2.9
Canada 11.6
England 9.1
India 10.3
Ireland 12.4
Kenya 6.9
Netherlands 11.5
New Zealand 6.3
Pakistan 16.0
Scotland 2.2
South Africa 10.2
Sri Lanka -0.3
West Indies 4.9
Zimbabwe 3.1
What’s that? Australia has a negative home field advantage? Well, according to the data, Australia will tend to score an extra 4.5 runs per inning played on foreign shores.
This is a bit of a puzzling development – and its not for the most obvious reason.
Ok maybe it is slightly obvious – Australia grounds are, on average, some of the lower scoring when it comes to One Day Internationals. In fact, the average run rate in first innings in Australia ranks 11th out of 15 qualifying countries, while our ranking slips to 13th in the chase.
Typically, Australian grounds are more likely to have boundaries that are closer to the maximum size in ICC regulations – particularly compared to most sub-continental grounds.
India ranks number one in both first and second innings, while Pakistan is second on the first innings and third in run rate in the second innings. Sri Lanka, on the other hand, ranks 12th on both measures.
But who plays Australian grounds better than anyone else? Australia.
So what’s going on here?
The short answer is this. Australia plays away grounds better relative to home sides than travelling teams play in Australia play relative to Australia – leading to Australia’s ‘negative’ advantage at home. In essence, over the past 20 years, Australia has broadly been the best team in ODIs regardless of where they are played, and the fact that non-Australian grounds tend to be higher scoring than Australian grounds leads to this quirk.
You could call that a weakness in the analysis. I’d like to think it confirms it. To me, it suggests that the lower scoring nature of Australian grounds effectively acted as a bridge between Australia’s talent filled batting line ups and the less sparkly line ups of other teams.
That won’t do it? Ok, here’s run rates for each full member nation by country – the colours are like a heat map, if green was the hottest colour and red was the coolest:
Australia has the highest or second highest average run rate in all but two countries Sri Lanka and Pakistan – and we’re third and fourth there, respectively. When you’re the best in the world, it doesn’t matter where you play. But if you aren’t?
What does this mean for the World Cup?
Well, if you aren’t Australia circa 1992 through 2013, where you play tends to matter. The 2015 World Cup is going to be held in Australia and New Zealand. So lets now go back to the first set of numbers, and tweak them to reflect the home field status of Australia and New Zealand in this edition of the World Cup:
Advantage (runs)
New Zealand 6.3
Sri Lanka 0.3
Scotland -2.2
Bangladesh -2.9
Zimbabwe -3.1
Australia -4.5
West Indies -4.9
England -9.1
South Africa -10.2
India -10.3
Ireland -12.4
Pakistan -16.0
New Zealand is likely to have a six-run edge over their opponents throughout this World Cup by virtue of the games being held in familiar surrounds.
By contrast, Pakistan will be giving up their world-leading 16 run head start.
It’s not massive, and with teams able to score seemingly at will in recent times, home field advantage may not play a hugely important role in shaping the eventual winner of the World Cup.
But it will almost certainly help decide seedings for the knockout stages, which could be the difference between a team getting an easy ride to the pointy end of the tournament and facing a more difficult road.
And put it this way, would you rather be New Zealand or Pakistan with these numbers in mind?
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