Ask The Question
As a cricket fan, I am always eager to study statistics and the history of the game. The questions this dashboard answers are - 

• How many matches are played in a year? What affects this?

• How many countries have hosted cricket matches? Has this number increased or decreased over the years?

• Which countries have hosted the most matches?

Cricket is a game which churns out several statistics with each minute that the game is played. Thus it is natural that I had many more than just the above questions. However, the scope of this Tableau Dashboard is to answer only the above questions.

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Data Collection
I searched for a cricket database on Kaggle.com and found an ODI cricket matches dataset.
This contained data for all ODI matches from 1971 to May 2023 with information on the participating teams, winners, margin of victory, ground and date of the match. I sourced the remainder of the matches played in 2023 from Howstat.com.
Hence, I decided to begin with finding answers to the above questions for the ODI format (excluding the other two formats played internationally - Tests and T20Is).
I later used a library from geonames.org to source names of countries for the respective cities. I will elaborate on this in the next section - Data Cleaning & Preparation.

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Data Cleaning & Preparation
I opened the dataset in MS Excel and found that it was quite thorough and did not seem to have any errors.
I had information of the cricket ground for each match, but not the country. This is when I downloaded the very helpful file - cities15000 from geonames.org and used a vlookup on excel to create a new column with the title country. There were a few entries with the ground name instead of the city name, I filtered these grounds and entered the country name for all the grounds. 
The next challenge I faced was missing data for the ODIs played between the months of June to Dec 2023. I found this data on Howstat.com, however the date format was different. I fixed this in the Excel file by first converting the dates from text format to date format using the text to columns functionality and then selecting all the dates, right clicking them, selecting the "format cells" option and selecting the same date format for all cells.

I needed to separate out the "year" from the match date. This I did in Tableau using the "Create Calculated Field" option and entering the formula - "Year([Match Date])".
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Data Visualization
Now with all my data prepared I was ready to work on the visualizations in Tableau.
 

I first created a simple view of the no. of ODI matches played annually. I used a line chart and the result was a graph with the line constantly going up and down. On looking closely, I noticed a trend of higher matches in ODI world cup years, which made sense since teams focus more on playing ODIs in the lead up to an ODI world cup. Furthermore, the year after an ODI world cup, there was a drastic reduction in the no. of games. I decided to keep only the world cup years as part of the visualization to get almost evenly spaced milestones in the history of ODI cricket with the highest number of ODIs being played among the 2-3 year span around world cup years. This graph gives us an indication of the progress of ODI cricket over the years. 
 

With the rise in popularity of T20 cricket from 2007, when the first T20I world cup was played, the no. of ODIs played in a year saw a decline in the 2010s with a recent bounce back in the numbers. This bounce back could be attributed to ICC granting ODI status to all matches played as part of the world cup qualifier tournament, regardless of the team not having ODI status prior to the tournament. This led me to the second question that is represented in the graph "No. of countries that hosted ODIs". The highest number in history, 23 countries hosted ODIs in 2022, the year in which the world cup qualifiers were played.
 

I was then curious to know which countries have hosted the most number of matches and I created the bar chart with the top 10 countries by no. of ODI matches hosted till date. I wasn't surprised to see India at the top, given that every cricketing nation wishes to play against India and benefit from the high viewership. 

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Conclusion

After the format gained popularity through the 1980s and 1990s, the advent of T20 Internationals challenged the sustained popularity of ODI cricket through the 2010s. With more national teams across the globe being granted ODI status and with the ODI world cup every 4 years being an event that cricket fans continue to eagerly seek, it is safe to say that ODI cricket is here to stay, with India being the leading host country.

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