The 2022 edition of the T20 World Cup is fast approaching its conclusion, with England set to play Pakistan in the final this Sunday (weather permitting). As many look ahead to the final, it also feels an appropriate time to look back at the tournament so far. Chaos threatened in the group stages - with Ireland beating England and Netherlands toppling South Africa, in addition to a few washouts, but in the end there were few surprises in the lineup for the knockout rounds. England's demolition of India in the semi-final will probably go down as the performance of the tournament, but very well may be forgotten about if they do not overcome a potent Pakistan side in the final.
In this article however, we want to assess the performances of individual players. We'll do this via our player rating system, described in more detail below. This article will specifically focus on the batters, but there is an accompanying article with an identical analysis run for bowlers. Once the final has been played, we will re-run our model and use the final results to inform our Team of the Tournament, and also take a moment to assess how our pre-tournament prediction model performed.
Our player rating system looks at the outcome of every ball bowled in the tournament so far, and generates ratings based on a combination of two factors. For batters these are how well they preserve their wicket, and how quickly they score runs. For bowlers these are how well they keep the runs down, and how much of a wicket taking threat they have been.
These player ratings use regression modelling to account for the quality of their opposition, which means that, for example, the wicket of Virat Kohli is worth more to the bowler than that of, say, Mark Wood, and that runs scored off Mitchell Santner are worth more than those scored off Shoriful Islam.
The model also allows us to adjust the weighting we place on run-scoring or wicket preservation. Here we look at the batters, using three different weighting values to assess their performance in the group stage, with a qualifying criteria of having scored a minimum of 100 runs:
Our model is fairly adamant that the standout batter of the tournament has been Suryakumar Yadav. Whilst his average for the tournament was some way below that of Virat Kohli (who holds the record of most runs and highest average) this is T20 cricket we're talking about - strike rate is very important, and Yadav excels in this regard. His strike rate sits at an incredible 189, dwarfing pretty much everyone else in the qualifying period, all the more impressive given he also scored the volume of runs to back it up. We do see that if we weight towards wicket preservation, Yadav does dip behind Kohli into second place, which reflects Kohli's steadier accumulation of runs.
It makes sense from here to go down the list player by player, focusing on the balanced column as a reference point but calling out anything interesting that pops out.
In 3rd and 4th spot we have England opening pair Jos Buttler and Alex Hales. There is little to argue with here, they have both had reasonably strong tournaments, and their semi-final heroics would have seen them cement their places near the top of this list.
Next we have a slightly surprising name, in Glenn Maxwell. He only played 4 games in the tournament, so did well to reach our 100 run qualification in the first places, ending up with 118 in total. He was also boosted by his ferocious strike rate of 161, which is reflected by his jump up to 2nd place in the run-scoring weighted column.
Following him we have a pair of New Zealanders in Glenn Phillips and Daryl Mitchell. There is a bit of a contrast of styles here - Mitchell scored reasonably quickly, but was very difficult to dismiss, only getting out twice in his 4 innings, leaving with a handsome 50+ average. Phillips, on the other hand, was able to score big runs very quickly, including a 64 ball 104 against Sri Lanka. This contrast is reflected in Mitchell's appearance in the wicket preservation column and Phillips' appearance in the run-scoring column.
Rounding out our balanced ranking are Stoinis - who averaged an impressive 42 across his 4 innings - Lorcan Tucker, who was superb in a successful tournament for Ireland, and Litton Das. Das is an interesting case, having only averaged 25, but he scored the bulk of his runs against the tough attacks of South Africa and India, and it took a run out to dismiss him in the India game, so our model rates his overall batting performance highly.
On the left hand side we have a few different names appearing. Max O'Dowd of the Netherlands is one of them, who as it stands is actually the second highest run-scorer in the competition. The fact that he did this across 8 games and scored the bulk of his runs against weaker sides means that he doesn't feature as high in our rankings, but it's impressive nonetheless for an associate player to be ranked alongside our top performers, The same could be said for George Munsey, who hit two fifties in three innings in the preliminary group stage for Scotland, despite not progressing any further.
On the other side of the list we see the likes of de Kock and Roussow appear. It's a similar story for both of these players, both have modest averages and total run-scoring stats, but their extremely potent 160+ strike rates ensure that our model recognises their value in the T20 format.
Thanks for reading! If you liked this, please check out the bowling analysis, or have a look at some of our older articles here.