Identifying competitive anxiety factors affecting the performance of cricket players: A multivariate statistical approach

In India, cricket is seen different from other games. Many people play it in open space, and some choose it as their career but only a few perform well and reach its highest position. There are many reasons for ill-performance, among them one of the main reasons is competitive anxiety. Many good players are affected by anxiety at some point of time in their career. Therefore, identifying the competitive anxiety level in sports persons becomes a more important topic for researchers and trainers. The main purpose of the present study is to identify the competitive anxiety factors influencing the performance of the college level cricket players. For this purpose, well structured questionnaire was developed and personally administrated to four hundred and eighty college level cricket players in and around Coimbatore city, Tamil Nadu. Of these, four hundred and sixty eight questionnaires (97.5%) was filled fully and received back. Statistical methods K-means clustering was used to group the dataset, and then keeping these groups as dependent variable, a stepwise discriminant analysis was performed to reduce the number of questions and also to select most appropriate questions. Factor analysis was applied on the selected questions and it found the factors affecting the performance. The empirical results suggest that two groups were meaningful, based on the mean values groups, named as high and low anxiety. Stepwise discriminant analysis selected eight variables and from factor analysis internal pressure was the most important factor which affects the performance of the players.