SILCHAR, March 20 - In a bid to give a practical dimension to their study of measuring the fielding performances of cricketers, Assam researchers Prof Dibyojyoti Bhattacharjee and Dr Hemanta Saikia have come out with a list of best fielders and wicketkeepers in the just concluded Nidahas Trophy T20 tri-series in Sri Lanka using Field-o-Meter, the software developed by them.
Sharing their observations, with The Assam Tribune, Prof Dibyojyoti Bhattacharjee, Head of the Department of Statistics at Assam University Silchar said that performances of the first ten cricketers in the tournament in terms of their fielding score was tabled. In order to express it in relative terms the performance of the best fielder was taken to be 100 and others are indexed relative to the best performer.
Elaborating on the data, Prof Bhattacharjee said that Suresh Raina of Team India was found to be the best fielder of the tournament followed by Mehidi Hasan of Bangladesh. Also India has five fielders in the top 10 followed by Sri Lanka (3) and Bangladesh (2). However, since ground fielding comes into play in the model so more number of catches or run outs implemented was not the sole criteria for ranking of the fielders.
Moreover, as wicketkeepers have a different role to play, so the wicketkeeping performance was measured separately.
�Our measurement technique works in three layers. In the first layer we made an attempt to check if the fielding activity corresponding to a particular ball has led to a dismissal or not. In the second level it is checked if there is a dismissal � then what was the quality of the batsman who was dismissed. A batsman with higher rating if dismissed shall fetch more credit to the fielder than any lower order batsman dismissed,� Prof Bhattacharjee maintained.
Further, Prof Bhattacharjee said that on instances of no dismissal, the fielding activity was assessed by the performance of the fielder corresponding to particular fielding activity. �A ground fielding followed by a poor throw shall give lesser praise to the fielder than a sharp fielding and an instant throw at the right end,� the researcher claimed.
Moreover, in the third level, the difficulty associated with each of the fielding activity, whether a dismissal or otherwise was quantified. �In this level, we tried to quantify the difficulty level corresponding to each fielding activity of the fielders. If a fielder succeeds to save runs by aborting a shot for boundary from the batsman than the fielder shall get a higher score than a routine save of the boundary,� Prof Bhattacharjee stated.
Interestingly, he claimed that the weights are subjective since there is insufficient statistics available related to fielding so fielding had to be quantified through some element of subjectivity in its measures. A fielding activity leading to a fall of wicket (run out or catch) leads to loss of resources of the opponent team so, such an activity is given more importance compared to ground fielding, Prof Bhattacharjee added.
The quantified fielding performance of a given player in different balls of the match is then added together to get the overall fielding performance of that player in the match. The fielding performances of a player in different matches could be added up to rank fielders in a series or tournament, the researchers feel.
