Cricket is and has been the most popular sport in India for decades, way more than any other sports in the nation. When it comes to fan-following, even their national sports- Hockey doesn’t even come close. As crazy as it may sound, to Indians Cricket is not only a sport, it is also like a religion to them. They have been one of the top ranked teams for quite some times and been respected and admired by Cricket fans all around the world. When they play in their home grounds with their ‘Billions’ of fans behind them, they are almost unbeatable. But that all changes when they go play abroad. India seems to struggle performing abroad while they do significantly better at home. That’s why the phrase “Tigers at home, lambs abroad” has been associated to them by some of their “Fans(!)”. But is the accusation valid? And if so, is India the only team to be accused?
Let’s be honest here, Cricket is not like any other game. It is probably the weirdest game of all. It would be hard to find another game where a couple of hours of unexpected rain can change the course of a match by giving a gigantic and often an unfair advantage to a team. In cricket playing in different climates also requires different strategies and game plan. So obviously the team playing in their home already know their climate better and have probably built their strengths accordingly. So, it is unfair to say that India is the only team to struggle abroad when we see all Asian teams struggle to cope with the conditions in Australia and European countries and vice versa.
To see if my intuition is correct, I took a deep dive to find out the winning ratio of the top 10 teams in ICC ranking. I used the dataset of all the One Day International cricket matches from year 1971-2017, and identified the winning record of all teams. Then I separated the winning ratio of all the teams into two parts. One was the winning ratio of all the matches a team played in their own ground and the other was the winning ratio of all the matched the team played abroad.
The result wasn’t surprising. The graph indicates that India performs better at their home ground than abroad (60.68%-win ratio at home vs 50.6%-win ratio abroad), but so do the other teams. It seems like all the teams tend to do way better at home than abroad. If the data tells us anything it’s that India’s performance aboard is actually better than most teams in the top 10 rankings. So ‘Tigers at home, Lambs abroad’ can be associated to any other teams; Except for Afghanistan. Looking at the data It may seem odd that Afghanistan has won more than fifty percent of their matches playing aboard, but failed to win a single match at home. But when you realize the fact that Afghanistan team has not played a single match in their home country due to their security situation and lack of international standard facility, the data doesn’t seem odd anymore.
Even when I looked at the winning ratio of home vs aboard of all the top 10 team combined, I found out that out of all the matches played by these teams, only 42% of the time the visiting team was able to defeat the home team. In comparison when India played as visiting team, they were able to win 50.6% of the time which is pretty impressive comparing to the average.
Conclusion
Cricket is a tough sport. Playing overseas it gets even tougher. All the teams struggle to perform well while playing abroad. So only blaming India for their poor performance overseas is not fair. It must be accepted that home advantage is a real thing and every team uses it. And India’s performance abroad is actually better that most other countries. So Indian team doesn’t really deserve the ‘Tigers at home, Lambs abroad’ title.
You can find the notebook and dataset Here