After posting our analysis on England last week, there were a number of comments requesting that we replicate the analysis for the other test playing nations. As such, we've decided to go ahead and do just that, and who better to start with than England's current opponents, India.
As we did with England, we start our analysis with the batting. India's batting lineup is one of the strongest in world cricket, with 3 out of the top 7 ranked batsmen in test cricket according to the ICC. This follows a long and proud tradition of world class Indian batsmen going back to the seventies and eighties with Sunil Gavaskar, through the nineties and noughties with the likes of Tendulkar, Dravid and Ganguly, and onto the current crop spearheaded by captain Virat Kohli.
For our analysis we use ball by ball data from each of India's test matches starting with their tour of the West Indies in 2016, and concluding with the World Test Championship final contested a couple of months ago. The data is then run through our regression based player ratings system which aims to give an indication of a player's quality whilst also controlling for the strength of the opposition - for batsmen this effectively means that batting well against someone like James Anderson is worth more than it would be for, say, a part-time bowler such as Joe Root.
This then gives us a summary of India's batting over the last 5 years, which we'll discuss in more detail below. For now there a few things to note. Firstly, our model has an adjustable weight that allows us to place more emphasis on either scoring runs or wicket preservation - we have chosen to order the players using a weight that puts a little more emphasis on wicket preservation to reflect the importance of retaining your wicket in test cricket, especially when compared to the shorter formats of the game. In the final column, however, we have included the rankings for when we weight towards run scoring. This adds some important context around some batsmen - often in the lower order - who are valued for the ability to score their runs quickly.
We have also included a 'Rating' column - which is a normalised version of the raw output we get from the model. Whilst alone these numbers are meaningless, they function well as a means to understand the relative strengths of the respective batsmen.
Lastly, we have imposed a minimum qualification criteria of 10 innings in the timeframe we are looking at. Here are the results:
It should be no surprise to anybody whatsoever to see Virat Kohli top the list here. An original member of cricket's 'fab four', Virat Kohli has come good on the potential he showed in the early 2010s. His last five years have arguably been his most impressive, especially considering his additional responsibilities as captain in both test and limited overs cricket.
That being said, there isn't all that much to separate him from the next players in our list - Rohit Sharma and Cheteshwar Pujara. There is little surprise about Sharma's position on the list given his excellent batting average, but seeing Pujara right behind them is a little unexcepted, given his average is over 12 runs fewer than Sharma. Those who have watched much of him will know, however, that he is notoriously difficult to dismiss, and this is reflected when we dig deeper into his performances over the last five years.
Firstly, the average ball to Pujara over the last 5 years was bowled by a bowler averaging 32 - this means that generally he has faced tougher bowling than either Sharma (faced bowlers averaging 33) or Kohli (34). Given the bowling that Pujara has faced in the last five years, you would expect him to have been dismissed 139 times - he's only got out 85 times during this period. All this adds up to Pujara being a truly excellent test match batsmen and well worthy of his place in our list just behind Kohli and Sharma.
Sitting in fourth place, a little way back, is Mayank Agarwal, and it feels like a good opportunity to look at all the potential openers at once. Agarwal made a great start to his test career with two double centuries in his first 8 games, but poor form since then saw him lose his opening spot to Shubman Gill. An injury meant that Gill has been unable to play in the ongoing tour of England, and a concussion to Agarwal meant that Rahul was given another chance after losing his spot a couple of years ago.
Whilst Rahul has batted well in the series so far, our model rates Agarwal as the best option in this position, and rates Gill - who only averages a little over 30 - as the next best. It will be interesting to see what the selectors decide when all three are fit and available to play.
Next we have Rishabh Pant, one of the most exciting batsmen in test cricket at moment. His average of nearly 44 is impressive even before you consider his aggressive playing style, and the fact that he ranks first amongst Indian batsmen when we weight towards run-scoring underlines him as an extremely dangerous player.
The remainder of the middle part of the list is made of a handful of middle or lower batsmen from over the past few years - Vihari, Rahane, Jadeja and Vijay. The order they come out may be surprising, however, with Vihari being judged as the best of these despite an inferior batting average. A closer look at his test career so far reveals that he has played half of his tests against a very strong Australian bowling attack, and a couple more against an arguably stronger New Zealand attack.
This means that he has generally spent his career facing higher quality bowling than the other three names we listed and so perhaps has actually done quite well to maintain an average nearing 33.
It's a slightly different story if we weight towards run-scoring however, which is where Jadeja's aggressive lower order batting comes into its own. He jumps up to sixth, swapping positions with Vihari, who drops to ninth. Interestingly, however, we also see Rahane drop to tenth here, indicating that the selectors would be wise to keep Vihari in their thinking.
And finally, just to round up the remaining on the list, we have wicket-keeper Saha, all-rounder Pandya and opener Dhawan. Whilst Saha and Pandya's modest test averages explain their position towards the bottom of the list, Dhawan might be disappointed to see himself ranked behind them, especially given his superior batting average.
This respectable average is put into context when we look into the ball by ball breakdown of Dhawan's career, however - the average ball he faced in test cricket was delivered by a bowler averaging nearly 40. This means that - with his average of just over 40 - he barely outscored what an average player would do given the bowling he faced.
That concludes our run through of India's batting. Whilst there is not much here that followers of Indian cricket wouldn't already know, it does highlight India's strength in depth in batting, and shines a light on a couple of players who perhaps aren't rated as highly as they should be. Based on our analysis, Pujara's performances over the past 5 years suggest he deserves to considered alongside Kohli and Sharma as one of India's stars, and we also make a case that Vihari's modest batting average shouldn't discount him from selection should a position in the team open up.
Thanks for reading! This article is part of a series in which we apply our player ratings system to each major test playing nation in turn in order to gain more of an understanding of their batting and bowling options respectively - please check out the other articles if you haven't already:
India - Batting | Bowling
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