New Zealand Cricket (NZC) has turned to Spark’s data analytics subsidiary Qrious to help it analyse game and player performance and gain competitive advantage for its Blackcaps and White Ferns teams in the 2019 ICC World Cup.
NZC says it will also apply the technology competitors’ previous matches to assess their performance and strategies, help to predict future performance, inform players what to look out for, and influence their own tactics to counter specific opponent plays.
Qrious CEO Nathalie Morris said Qrious had automated the collection, cleaning and integration of NZC’s data - including match, ball tracking and weather data - and stored it in the Microsoft Azure cloud, from where it can be extracted into Tableau or PowerBI for analysis and reporting.
“Now NZC’s analysts can easily extract any data they like for analysis and reporting and it’s fully scalable, which means this solution can be applied at a domestic level and help drive a better standard of cricket overall."
She added: "The quality, quantity and sheer speed of processing provided by Qrious’ data automation has freed up NZC’s performance analytics team to focus less on data collation and more on drawing critical insights to feed back to coaches and players."
NZC says the technology has empowered coaches to ask for more specific information on any aspect of a game and enabled analysts to easily generate relevant insight to give the teams a competitive edge.
NZC performance analysis manager Paul Warren said data analysis had always been a time-consuming and highly manual process of tagging, coding and formatting visual data.
"The data itself takes the form of tagged videos. However, until now, we’ve never had an effective way to analyse that data, understand ball-by-ball play and feed insights back into training and performance.
"With the Qrious solution now in place, the easy access to data and quick turnaround on insights and outputs to feed back into training is at a whole new level. There is less time spent gathering and collating the information and more time spent extracting actionable insights - improving individual performance, informing player selection, measuring ourselves against the competition and enhancing game strategies.”