The Story Of Impact Index

Film-maker Jaideep Varma decided that Cricket analytics systems through the years had gotten it all wrong- so he devised his own. This is the story of Impact Index, a method that places a great deal of importance on the context of a player's performances.

- Anand Vasu

I may as well say it at the outset — I don’t think Sir Don Bradman was as good as his numbers indicate. Sure, he was the greatest batsman of all time, but an average of 99.94 puts him almost 40 points ahead of the next best. Surely he couldn’t have been that good? I’m clearly in the minority, though — as I travelled around the cricket world, speaking to former players, some of the cream of the crop, the verdict was unanimous: yes, Bradman was indeed that good. I struggled to believe it and reluctantly demurred, cursing the fact that cricket invests so much in one number — average. It does very little to accurately reflect either the context of an innings, the conditions it was played in or the actual effect it had on the outcome of a match.

Then, in 2009, I happened to come across someone who I could only accurately describe as a cricket-statistics-analysis evangelist. This man believed everyone who had tried to look at cricket through numbers had done it wrong all through the history of the game — and that he had cracked the code. I was working at the