Home Ground Advantage

By Adrian Meredith

MELBOURNE, Australia (TheSportsNEXT) November 18, 2012: In the past three years, these are the results in test cricket:

India: At home: 10-1 (90.9%) Away: 3-12 (20%) Improvement at home: 70.9%

Pakistan: At home: 5-1 (83.3%) Away: 7-10 (41.2%) Improvement at home: 42.1%

Sri Lanka: At home: 3-3 (50%) Away: 1-6 (14.3%) Improvement at home: 35.7%

West Indies: At home: 3-4 (42.9%) Away: 1-6 (14.3%) Improvement at home: 28.6%

England: At home: 12-3  (80%) Away: 7-6 (53.8%) Improvement at home: 26.2%

New Zealand: At home: 3-5 (37.5%) Away: 2-6 (25%) Improvement at home: 12.5%

Australia: At home: 10-4 (71.4%) Away: 7-4 (63.4%) Improvement at home: 8%

South Africa: At home: 5-4 (55.6%) Away: 6-1 (85.7%) Improvement at home -32.1%

Notes:

(1) Bangladesh have not won any games in the past 3 years, either home and away and hence have no home ground advantage.

(2) Zimbabwe have only played 3 tests, which is too small a data set to be useful.

(3) Draws are not included in the analysis - many of these are rain affected anyway and it is difficult to determine their usefulness.

Conclusions:

India have really unusual home conditions that other teams can't handle:

India is certainly a bit warmer and more humid than most other cricketing nations (though it can be hot and humid in the West Indies too) and their pitches tend to be dry and dusty, with slow and low bounce that suits spinners, and makes it hard for players that are used to higher bounce. South Africa, Sri Lanka and Australia have done the best in India; but still worse than they have done in other countries. It has been argued that there is nothing unfair about it - that other teams could also make pitches and conditions that are difficult for their opponents to handle too, they just haven't done it as well as India have. There is nothing in the rules to prohibit doctoring pitches and conditions to suit the home team and India are doing nothing wrong in doing it.

India are terrible away from home:

Most teams do a lot of work to try to get used to foreign conditions. Pakistan and Australia are even looking at using England's Duke ball in their domestic games so that England don't have such a huge home ground advantage. Teams practice on low and slow bounce pitches. They practice against spinners. And so forth. Yet apparently India don't, or at least not as much as other teams, and not as effectively. Perhaps this is due to money. Perhaps India's BCCI are poorer than most national boards and can't afford this level of coaching and preparation. Some fans claim that teams such as Australia (with only an 8% advantage at home, the second lowest) secretly cheat against India, and only India, by secretly preparing different pitches against them so that they can win every game against India at home, as some kind of secret revenge - something that they don't bother doing against anyone else.

South Africa are the fairest team:

It has long been stated that England, South Africa and Australia have the fairest home conditions for visiting teams, because each ground that they use are vastly different, some suiting pace, some spin, some swing, some good for batting, others good for bowling, and so forth. But now we have evidence to prove it. South Africa look very good out of this, and Australia look pretty good too - disproving any claims that Australia ever doctored their pitches. It does look bad for England too, another piece of information that the Duke ball is a very different ball to the others and grants England a huge home ground advantage. England, however, do not statistically have the greatest home ground advantage.

Pakistan don't suffer too much from not being able to play at home:

Pakistan was actually a pretty fair place to go to, cricketing wise, in terms of the playing surfaces used. While in the past they were accused of having biased umpires, not to mention that food and drinking water affected the health of some visiting teams, all of that has been dealt with now and it is quite fair. Sadly, of late, the fear of terrorism and violence against teams - since 9/11 but more recently with the attacks on the Sri Lankan team bus - has meant that nobody is prepared to play against them. Somewhat surprisingly, they now have the 2nd biggest home ground advantage, something that certainly wasn't the case in the past!

England vs India matches are the most pointless of them all:

Since the Future Tours Program started, there are a lot more one sided test series (and other international series) than there used to be, as teams are forced to play against each other when they often don't want to. Remember when Sri Lanka were terrible and nobody wanted to play against them? They complained bitterly, but the reality was that it forced them to improve and be good enough for other teams to want to play against them. This is no longer an incentive for Zimbabwe or Bangladesh. And, unfortunately, it means that we have to go through these hum drum pointless series that probably wouldn't be played if not for the Future Tours Programs. I might be wrong, of course, as perhaps there is some interest in India to see their team decimate an English team who never have any hope of winning in India, and perhaps similarly English fans enjoy winning every single game by huge margins in India. Nonetheless, if the Future Tours Program was dropped, then teams could "vote with their feet", so to speak, by refusing to play against teams that have unfair home conditions, either with an unfairly different Duke ball, or with unfair conditions. There are many reasons to get rid of the Future Tours Program, and I can't think of a single legitimate reason to keep it - but this just adds to the reasons for why it should be taken out.