With the World Cup round the Corner, one of the pastimes of all Cricket lovers is to watch the performance of all the players in the world cup and arrive at the "Man of the World Cup". Unfortunatley there are no easy indicators to identify the real Man of the World Cup. There will be spectacular brilliance in a Century where a batsman like Sehwag can mesmorize the audience. But there can also be a silent worker who keeps contributing again and again, with bat and ball and on the field whose contribution may go unnoticed.


We therefore need an efficient Cricket Rating System which truly idenitifies the best performance in a scientific manner. Naavi's Cricket Rating is one such method which is scientific and has stood the test against other rating systems in the past.

Naavi Cricket Rating was specially developed for the 1999 world cup. Those were the days when the Cricket rating system was new and the only popular rating was the Ceat rating which was not very satisfactory.
There was of course Kumble rating which was relatively better than Ceat rating.

The Naavi rating system had a fantastic success as the results were revealed over the Internet match by match and lead to the ultimate winner of the "Man of the World Cup 1999" title by Lance Klusner. It was no surprise that the expert Committee led by Sunil Gavaskar who were given the task of manually assessing the Man of the Tournament also arrived at the same conclusion. Some of the reports of interim analysis of the Best Player at the league stage, best Indian player etc were also reported in the Press from time to time.

The maiden entry of Naavi Rating caught the imagination of several cricket lovers world over.

Subsequently the rating systems if ICC were introduced and some of the principles which Naavi Rating had introduced for the first time such as weigtage for "Opposition Strength" were incorporated in other rating systems as well. During the subsequent World Cup, Naavi did not present his ratings and analysis of performance due to his other pre-occupations.

Now with a renewed interest in the World Cup 2007, Naavi Rating is making a come back with a few more innovations. The important innovation this time is to recognize that a player's mental outlook on the game while setting a target and chasing or defending a target are different and it has an impact on the performance. Hence the evaluation of performance has to take the factor of whether the player is setting the target or defending a target into consideration. The batsmen sets the target if the his side is batting first and chasing the target if his side is batting second. A bowler is setting a target if his side is bowling first and is defending the target if his team is bowling second.

There are more innovations for readers to check at the rating site.The rating would be calculated match by match and results would be put on the website http://www.naavi.org/cwc_2007

I urge the Cricekt Lovers to follow the ratings and see how it matches with the man of the match and man of the series awards that may follow from ICC.

Naavi