The High-Performance Challenge

New Zealand’s national cricket teams play in an intensely competitive environment. Success hinges on effectively analysing teams to ensure optimum player selection and tactics for campaigns and matches. 

NZC’s partnership with Qrious led to the development of one of the most advanced data analysis platforms in world cricket and provides New Zealand’s top teams with a competitive advantage. They can now analyse more data than any team in the world to inform selection and tactics. 

The innovative solution relies on access to data, of which NZC has an abundance and which it had been using to analyse player performance for years. However, it was a time-consuming, manual process. NZC couldn’t easily extract actionable insights to feed back to coaches and players in a timely manner.

“When we started the journey, we had countless segregated data sources. We needed to bring them together so we could eliminate duplication and look at all the pieces of the jigsaw at the same time,” says Warren.

NZC needed a better way of handling, automating and analysing performance data.

The High-Performance Challenge
New Zealand’s national cricket teams play in an intensely competitive environment. Success hinges on effectively analysing teams to ensure optimum player selection and tactics for campaigns and matches. 

NZC’s partnership with Qrious led to the development of one of the most advanced data analysis platforms in world cricket and provides New Zealand’s top teams with a competitive advantage. They can now analyse more data than any team in the world to inform selection and tactics. 

The innovative solution relies on access to data, of which NZC has an abundance and which it had been using to analyse player performance for years. However, it was a time-consuming, manual process. NZC couldn’t easily extract actionable insights to feed back to coaches and players in a timely manner.

“When we started the journey, we had countless segregated data sources. We needed to bring them together so we could eliminate duplication and look at all the pieces of the jigsaw at the same time,” says Warren.

NZC needed a better way of handling, automating and analysing performance data.


So, Qrious migrated NZC’s on-premises data to the cloud and acquired new data sources to enrich it. This enabled NZC to automate the collection, cleaning and integration of multiple data sets and store them in a single platform. It offers a richer picture of external factors that might affect performance, such as ball-tracking, weather, injury and training workloads.

“We bring it all together around team and player performance, and look for cause-and-effect relationships. This influences what else we may need to bring into the training environment to ensure that we can perform. Winning is a given, but performance is about executing the things we’ve worked on in the moment,” says Warren.

“Qrious has an ability to take what we want and create a solution. It’s amazing to have an external provider that can so quickly become aligned with what you are trying to achieve. They just get it.”

The digital platform offers a scalable solution. So, as NZC gains access to more data sets, it can simply integrate these into the platform and gain even deeper insights.

NZC can easily extract data into visualisation tools for analysis and reporting. Insights that previously took days to generate are now available to the teams in real time, at the grounds, during the match. 

“Sport, particularly cricket, is dynamic. Now, we can quickly collate and review the information and decide whether we need to change anything, either during a series or following a review of the game,” says Warren.

Accessible data and insights mean more relevant information is passed on to coaches and players and key reports are generated automatically as part of the training process. They have access to smarter, higher-quality output from analysis so they can make more informed decisions for training and match preparation.

“The database is connected to our BI [business intelligence] software, which we use to build our reports. It’s shared with coaches online so they can easily interact with the data and analysis that we produce,” says Warren.

Coaches are empowered to ask for more specific information on any aspect of a game, and analysts can effortlessly generate relevant insights.

“The accessibility of the performance and athlete data has driven more engagement between coaches and players, and it allows conversations and decision-making processes to start from an objective point,” says Warren. “Some conversations have led to outcomes on the pitch as a result of this data.”