Abstract
Sports career is brief and sport career transition (SCT) is a well-researched topic to see how players deal with it. Cricket is the most popular sport in India and the game is evolving thick and fast. Cricket has become an all season sport barring rainy and snowy conditions. Plethora of options are now available to the players which includes test cricket, one day international (ODI), twenty 20 international (T20I), Indian Premier League (IPL) and similar franchise-based leagues on T20 and T10 along with first-class domestic cricket. With this deluge in cricket, it is pertinent to study career progression of cricketers. IPL, despite a brand value of US$6.3 billion, is often criticized for bringing players into limelight too soon, paving way for playing test matches and fading even sooner into oblivion being unable to cope with volume and variety of cricket. The present article analyses Indian cricketers’ career progression pattern using hierarchical clustering analysis, and it also investigates if cricketers are graduating faster from domestic to test cricket using two-sample t-test.
Introduction
Sports, in general, are a high risk, high consequent environment and the sportspersons target to earn their entire life’s livelihood during their playing span. Sport career transition (SCT) had consistently observed that post-sport life is full of uncertainty even for elite athletes (Stronach, 2012). Citing the example of Australia, a renowned sporting nation, the study reported that most of its sportspersons passed into oblivion after high profile careers in sport. Hickey and Kelly (2008) found out that Australian Football League (AFL) players remain so engrossed on establishing and prolonging their career as elite performers that their identity gets dictated by sports industry expectations. The study stressed on an education programme to prepare better for life after play.
The present study deals with cricket players’ career progression in the Indian context. Cricket is the most popular sport in India (Das, 2019). Frith (2001) had described cricket as a ‘stressful sport that is compulsive in nature with an inherent uncertainty that has the potential to damage the soul’. Though, there is no empirical evidence justifying the claim, several cricketers have reported mental problems during or after their playing career (e.g., Trescothick, 2009). Globally, there are 10 full members and 92 associate members of International Cricket Council (ICC), the apex body (ICC, n.d.). There are three international formats of cricket, viz. test, ODI and T20I. Mass acceptance of the shortest version of cricket, that is, T20 was epitomized by the success of the franchise-based Indian Premier League (IPL) started by the BCCI in India in 2008 (Kohli, 2011). Reaching a brand value of US$6.3 billion (Gupta, 2018), the success of IPL has almost changed the cricket ecosystem. Buoyed by IPL’s success, other countries are mimicking the franchise-based format. Cricket has transitioned from winter sports to an all season sport barring rainy and snowy conditions. With 10 over game, that is, T10 getting ICC approval in 2018 at the franchise level (Bose, 2018), the spectators can now enjoy test series, ODI series and tournaments, T20I series and tournaments and franchise-based T20 and T10 leagues apart from domestic first-class cricket. The key point is to see how cricketers are coping up with this cricket explosion. Many past stalwarts of the game are worried about the future of the game, especially the test format (Brearley, 2017; Holding, 2017). Bedi (2017), the legendary Indian spinner, is of the opinion that a good test cricketer is capable of delivering in all formats but not vice versa. He was critical that IPL performances are getting more importance for test match selection rather than Ranji Trophy and Duleep Trophy. There are two popular myths about IPL, viz. (a) IPL brings up players into limelight quickly and players are getting selected much faster for test matches with just few good performances in IPL and (b) they pass into oblivion even quicker since the necessary ‘hardening’ is not done by playing a lot of first-class cricket.
Given the brevity of sporting career and the amount of research done on SCT, it is surprising that cricket per se had not attracted much attention from the researchers. How this cricket explosion is affecting the career pattern of cricketers remained unaddressed so far. The present study aims to find answers to the following questions: (a) are players debuting in test matches for India playing less number of years of first-class cricket? (b) How are the cricketers coping up with the demand and the volume of different forms of cricket? Are these having any effect on the total playing span?
The study empirically analyses 16 years of data on Indian cricketers’ involvement at various levels (e.g., first class and international) and at various formats of cricket. Potentially, the outcome of this research cannot only help players and administrators to strategize career progression and cricket mix, respectively, but also shall add to the existing body of knowledge a novel way of tracking career progression for cricketers.
Literature Survey
Career termination is an unavoidable event in a sportsperson’s career. However, this is often coupled with negative phenomena like identity crisis (Brewer, Van Raalte, & Linder, 1993) and decline in life satisfaction (Taylor & Ogilivie, 1994). Park et al. (2012) reported that athletes go through a series of stages, viz. precontemplation, contemplation, preparation and action before calling quits. Research indicates major causes for voluntary retirement include (a) change in priorities like starting a family or studying (Alison & Meyer, 1988; Swain, 1991), (b) escape the politics of the governing body (Werthner & Orlick, 1986), (c) the loss of sporting goals (Park et al., 2012) or (d) reduced enjoyment and motivation (Lavallee et al., 1997). Major causes for involuntarily leaving the game include injury, deselection and age (Alfermann, 2000; Taylor & Ogilvie, 1994). According to Alfermann and Stambulova (2007), age need not be just an involuntary antecedent. Since ageing sportspersons identify soon when they cannot match the desired level of expectation and are forced to take the hard decision.
Since India is in the fulcrum of world cricket, it is pertinent to see how Indian cricket and cricketers are getting affected due to this deluge of cricket. However, there is a serious dearth of research literature on the topic. Roberts et al. (2015) explored the career termination experiences of former professional cricketers in the UK. The result showed retirement was more of a forced choice due to contractual pressures, lack of communication or sport devaluation, whereas happy parting was rare, if not non-existent.
Career theory outlines five stages of career, viz. growth, exploration, establishment, maintenance and decline (Super, 1980). While the first two stages focus on learning the skills, the establishment stage is related to fine-tuning and mastering the acquired skills. Maintenance stage is related to apply the skills and the decline stage is about exiting the career (Super, 1980; Super & Hall, 1978). Research indicates that the desires and motivations change with the stages of careers (Lawler, 1968; Maslow, 1943). Research literature provides evidence of individuals’ changing preference towards rewards along with the change in career stages (Lynn et al., 1996). Balasubramanian and Gloryson (2013) investigated the linkage between pay, performance and career stages based on professional cricketers in the Indian context, validating through equity theory, expectancy theory and career stage theory. Some of their startling observations included (a) over reward lead to better performance, (b) both over and under reward scenarios exist during the developmental stage of career and (c) batting and bowling skills are rewarded differently during the initial stage—bowlers lose out in influencing the outcome for cricket becoming more batting friendly game (Atkinson, 2009). While career progression pattern is related to career stages (e.g., growth, exploration, establishment, maintenance and decline), not much work could be found on its measurement constructs.
Data and Methodology
Since IPL started in 2008, the present study focussed on all Indian players debuting in test cricket between 1 April 2000 and 31 March 2016. This reference period ensured almost 8 years on either side of IPL kick off making any comparison between pre- and post-IPL balance.
Construct and Data Identification
In order to address the first research question, that is, whether players debuting in test matches for India are playing less number of years of first-class cricket, it is pertinent to compare average playing span of first-class cricket pre- and post-IPL era before debuting for India in test cricket. The hypothesis thus formed is
As far as cricket is concerned, growth stage in a player’s career starts with the first-class cricket. So ‘first class before test debut’ defined as number of years the player played first-class cricket before test debut can be a relevant measure. The average ‘first class before test debut’ for players debuting pre and post IPL were compared for testing the hypothesis.
For the second research question dealing with the career progression pattern, it was observed that the cricketers debuting in early part of the millennium were expected to be in the maintenance and decline stage when the IPL started. On the contrary, cricketers debuting in the latter half of the reference period might have played the IPL at growth and exploration stages. To bring them on a common platform, it was decided to include number of test matches, T20I and other T20s played along with total career span, and how much of it accounts for the test playing span in the underlying construct. Formally, the study considered Number_of_Tests_Played (number of test matches played by each player), Number_T20I_Played (number of T20 international matches played by each player), Number_other_T20_Played (number of other T20 matches [e.g., IPL, BBL and domestic T20s] played by each player), Playing_Span (number of years between first class debut and last first class/T20/international match played) and Years_in_Test (number of years the cricketer played test cricket) within the reference period.
Data Collection from Secondary Sources
The present research work is based on secondary data available at Cricinfo and Wikipedia. Wikipedia provided some valuable summary information (Wikipedia, n.d.), for example, player’s cap id, name, test debut year and last year he played test and number of test matches he played. However, the links to detailed pages on each cricketer were not information heavy. Cricinfo provided more useful players’ detailed information at Players/India/Test caps (Cricinfo, n.d.) and then crawling to respective players’ detailed pages. The information captured from these detailed pages are first class debut year, last year he played first class, last year he played T20, number of T20Is he played and number of other T20s he played.
Since the detailed pages are largely unstructured and no fixed format for data had been used, and there were only 57 debutants during the reference period, manual scraping technique was employed (Ray & Sengupta, 2018). After tabulating the above data in an excel sheet, data was validated randomly between Wikipedia and Cricinfo, the two sites used for scraping the data.
Data Pre-processing and Analysis
Two-sample pooled t-test was applied to test the hypothesis whether average number of years of first-class cricket before debuting for test matches has gone down. Four players debuting before IPL and five players debuting after IPL were excluded from this analysis because of their outlier effect. For example, Syed Saba Karim played almost 19 years of first-class cricket before debuting for India in test matches in 2000. In the post-IPL era, Naman Ojha played for 15 years before test debut in 2015.
Later hierarchical cluster analysis (HCA) was applied to decipher patterns of cricketers’ career. In HCA, each subject is characterized by certain attributes. It then uses the distance measure to build clusters in such a manner that subjects within a cluster are as close as possible and subjects across clusters are as far as possible. In this analysis each cricketer is a subject of study and their career progression constructs include Number_of_Tests_Played, Number_T20I_Played, Number_other_T20_Played, Playing_Span and Years_in_Test. So if players A and B are placed in the same cluster and players C and D are placed in another cluster then it can be concluded that players A and B share similar career progression pattern but A and C display different patterns.
Results
In order to check whether players are debuting in test matches by playing less number of years of first-class cricket post IPL, the following null hypotheses are formed:
The following test statistic was used for conducting two-sample pooled t-test for sample sizes exceeding 20, assuming both the samples to come from homoscedastic population:
where the pooled variance
The test statistic follows a t distribution under the condition that there is no difference in population mean with (n1 + n2 – 2) degrees of freedom. The outcome is depicted in Table 1.
As a next step, cricketers’ career progression pattern was analysed using HCA. Figure 1 provides a useful way of deciding upon the number of clusters to be used. It provides a graphical representation of average linkage between clusters. Less number of clusters leads to high average linkage and vice versa, and a trade-off between the two is necessary.
Result of Two-sample Pooled t-Test
A close scrutiny of Figure 1 revealed four clusters (player #3 to 50, 6 to 38, 37 to 23 and 34 to 22 as plotted in the dendrogram) that keep average linkage within each group less than six units approximately. The cluster centroids showing their individual characteristics are shown in Table 2.
Table 3 provides the characterization/face of clusters along with the list of cricketers identified in that cluster.
Hence it can be concluded that cricketers who are successful in test cricket generally get a successful stint in T20 as well (represented by clusters 3 and 4)—an idea resonated by two former India captains Sourav Ganguly and Dilip Vengsarkar (Gupta, 2019). Players who do not get much success in test cricket embraces T20 as an alternative option—some gets success (cluster 1) and the rest do not (cluster 2). However, all the clusters show a consistent overall playing span of 14–16 years whereas the test playing spans are much less and heterogeneous showing that players try to stretch their playing career irrespective of their success in test. IPL helps many players, unsuccessful at the test level, with platform to stretch their career rather than passing into oblivion. Alternatively put, it provides employment to many players.
Result of Cluster Analysis
Interpretation of Cluster Analysis Result
Conclusion
According to Camy (2006), almost 50 per cent European engages in a ‘sport’, out of which 20 per cent participate at events with federated associations, and almost everybody watches sporting events either live or on television which signifies the value of sports. The article also classified the entire gamut of sports industry into upstream, hard core and downstream activities. The hard core part deals with the sporting activities like playing the sports, supervision of sporting activities and operations of sports facilities. The set of sports-related activities like construction of facilities, manufacture of sports goods and distribution of sports goods are categorized in the upstream; and medicine, physiotherapy dietetics for sportsmen and women and sports journalism fall in the downstream.
Players of today are getting more options post-retirement in all the three aforementioned categories. Many ex-cricketers had taken up administrative roles (e.g., Andrew Strauss, David Richardson and Sourav Ganguly); coaching and mentor role (e.g., Ricky Ponting, Ravi Shastri and Shane Warne); commentary and columnist (e.g., Mike Atherton, Ian Chapell and Sunil Gavaskar) and so on. Still, it is worth analysing career progression since smooth SCT is still at a miniscule level, Jacob Martin (Cricketnext, 2019) being a recent example. The outcome of this research clearly suggests a test berth is still very challenging, notwithstanding the effect of IPL. Players who are good in test fare well in IPL as well. However, failure in test does not end the career—IPL can be a major boost to stretch one’s career. The administrators (e.g., ICC and BCCI) should encourage budding cricketers to play longer term cricket more to build the base and also plan the cricket mix accordingly. The study adds a novel way of tracking career progression for cricketers to the existing body of knowledge.
Limitations and Future Research
The present study is based on Indian cricketers only, since India introduced IPL as a trendsetter and is a leader of the game—both financially and skill-wise. Paucity of time and resources dictated the reference timeframe to be from 1 April 2000 to 31 March 2015. The same can be extended further on either side to include more cricketers.
Also, the same approach can be applied to cricketers belonging to other countries since franchise-based cricket has become a global phenomenon. Any world cricketer is now inundated with choices like playing international formats for own country and playing franchise-based leagues all over the world. Globally, how the cricketers are embracing this cricket explosion can provide meaningful insights to ICC for deciding on cricket mix between formats.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The author is grateful to the reviewer for conducting such an in-depth review. The same had enhanced the rigor of this work significantly.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.