The most talented cricket regions

[ElRaja]

Was reading the thread about certain people comparing which countries have the most cricket talent etc, so for my own curiousity i decided to do a comparison of which regions produce the most prolific test cricketers.

qualification is top 100 capped test cricketers, (by birth location, colin cowdrey counts as interior tamil nadu) don bradman dont make the list, neither to tonnes of players who played 15 or 20 years of test cricket pre world war 2.

secondly regions are chosen to keep them around a max of 10 million, but there are lots of exceptions because i couldn't think how to subdivide a city like Karachi.

from the non-city regions the largest is gauteng which has a population of around 15 million i think.

i know this analysis is not perfect, but tbh the fact that i was suprised by the region which came second and third on the list kinda makes up for it. so to rest the age old debate, who has the most natural cricket talent, id say NSW and Colombo and its surrounds in Sri Lanka take the prize.

also a lot of is made of the decline of west indies cricket, this to me suggests a lot of that might have to do with the inability of cricket talent in guyana to be converted into test quality.

heres the full table:

Region / City Number of Players in top 100 most capped test cricketers
___________________________________________________________
New South Wales 8
Western Province (SL) 7
Guyana 4
Lahore 4
Transvaal 3
Eastern Cape 3
Western Cape 3
New Delhi 3
Barbados 3
London 3
Antigua 3
Tasmania 2
Hyderabad 2
Yorkshire 2
Jamaica 2
Queensland 2
Kent 2
Western Australia 2
Kwazulu Natal 2
Chennai 2
Lancashire 2
Mumbai 2
Central Province (SL) 2
Canterbury 2
Gloucestershire 1
Limpopo 1
Mardan 1
Southern Province (SL) 1
Shimoga 1
Karachi 1
Vehari 1
Chandigarh 1
Nottinghamshire 1
Durham 1
Ahmednagar 1
Trinidad 1
Multan 1
Victoria 1
Jallandhar 1
Indore 1
Ranchi 1
Wellington 1
Nilgiris District 1
Cheshire 1
Otago 1
Auckland 1
Ratnagiri 1
Gauteng 1
Bangalore 1
North Western Province (SL) 1
South Australia 1
Kolkata 1
Warwickshire 1
Surrey 1
____________________________
Grand Total 100

theres a lot of things the data should be adjusted for, but i think its interesting nonetheless.

 

[hoshiarpurexpress]

In case of NSW there has been a clear selection bias over the years and you need to consider state moves of those capped players as well.
Mumbai used to be our batting factory and it’s more to do with Systems and school cricket and batting culture there then innate talent I would say.
Antigua for me is a place which has produced most talent.

 

[DeadlyVenom]

Quite an interesting thread. I'd have thought one of the English powerhouse counties would be a bit higher in the list.


It would be cool to see where players who have played 60+ tests have been born but I guess that data would be difficult to get.

Ultimately, though I applaud the effort in pulling this together and I genuinely found the content interesting, it does nothing to overturn my firm conviction that the most talented cricket regions are random villages in Pakistan.

 

[ElRaja]

In case of NSW there has been a clear selection bias over the years and you need to consider state moves of those capped players as well.
Mumbai used to be our batting factory and it’s more to do with Systems and school cricket and batting culture there then innate talent I would say.
Antigua for me is a place which has produced most talent.

i didnt include state moves cos it would take a lot of time, hence i wrote its not perfect, but i think birthplace is a good enough standard.

antigua per capita would deffo be on top. antigua and barbados together have 6 players represented despite a population of about 350,000 cumulatively.

Quite an interesting thread. I'd have thought one of the English powerhouse counties would be a bit higher in the list.


It would be cool to see where players who have played 60+ tests have been born but I guess that data would be difficult to get.

Ultimately, though I applaud the effort in pulling this together and I genuinely found the content interesting, it does nothing to overturn my firm conviction that the most talented cricket regions are random villages in Pakistan.

thanks mate, its actually not that difficult, it took me about 15 min a night over 4 nights to do this, with the 100 players, i think 219 have played 60+ tests so itd pbly take another 1.5 hours if someone has the time.

on england, i think 4 of the players in the list, cowdrey, kp, nass and strauss off the top of my head were foreign born which would weaken the represpentation of local counties.

 

[Thunderbolt14]

100 is a small number (relative to the number of cricketers that have ever played cricket) what happens when we extend this to top 500 capped players? Any resident statistician/database whiz who can write up a quick python or R script?