
Paul Warren (New Zealand Cricket)
New Zealand Cricket (NZC) has engaged Qrious to deliver data driven insights ahead of the upcoming 2019 Cricket World Cup, designed to improve game and player performance analysis.
Also including the New Zealand women's national cricket team - White Ferns - the association has implemented a data and analytics solution to make sense of performance information and statistics.
Specifically, the technology enables NZC to assess the performance and strategies of previous matches, to help predict future performance, improve player strategies and sharpen game tactics.
According to Paul Warren - manager of performance analysis at NZC - 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,” he said.
“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.
“Our coaches are requesting more and more specific information because we can generate it for them so quickly and easily.”
The move comes ahead of the 2019 Cricket World Cup, which begins on 30 May in England and Wales.
“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,” Warren added.
As part of the project, NZC tapped Spark-owned Qrious to optimise and streamline data processing, allowing teams to leverage insights and game data faster.
“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,” added Nathalie Morris, CEO of Qrious.
“We automated the collection, cleaning and integration of their data - including match, ball tracking and weather data - and stored it all in one place.
“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.”