The 2015 Ashes series is the current series of Test cricket matches being played between England and Australia. The venues for the series are, in order, Sophia Gardens, Lord’s, Edgbaston, Trent Bridge, and The Oval.[1] Australia were the defending trophy-holders going into the series.

England won the first test match by 169 runs to take the initial lead in this 5 match series. Australia leveled the series at 1-1 by winning the second match with a margin of 405 runs. The third test was again conquered by England as they beat Australia by 8 wickets. The series is currently held at 2-1 in favor of England.

The fourth test match of the series started on 6th August 2015 and saw some unexpected performances by Australian batsmen. The Australian line-up was beaten black and blue by the England pacemen as the kangaroos crumbled to an embarrassing 60 runs at loss of 10 wickets. And all this in just 18 overs and 3 balls. To rub salt into the wound, England batsman Joe Root scored a century on the 1st day itself.

Following this cricketing massacre, the social media exploded with comments, satires, jokes and sympathies. Where some people expressed amazement and euphoria, others were shocked and mournful. Here are some examples of social media posts:

To study the sentiments thoroughly, we performed social media monitoring on the social noise around ‘All out for 60’ and ‘#Ashes2015’ using our social media management tool, myRosys.

The various reports of social media monitoring help us gain great insight into what the people are talking about a particular topic. Let me take you through the various reports:

Words Cloud Analysis

The Words Cloud is a cluster of the most frequently used words in the social noise around the topic. The larger a word in the words cloud, more prominent it is.

Social media monitoring of ‘All out for 60’ revealed the following words cloud:

We can infer the following simply by looking at this words cloud:

• The trending hashtags around the topic are #ashes, #ashes2015, ashes2015rt, #aus, #cricketengland, #news, and #sydney
• The word ‘Australia‘ has been used the most. Even more than ‘England‘. That shows the popularity of Australian cricket team.
• @stuartbroad8 has also been used a lot of times. This is due to the praise that he received for his 8 wicket haul
• ‘Root‘ and his ‘century‘ are also popular discussion terms
• The ground for the ‘fourth‘ test ‘match‘, ‘Trent‘, is also widely used in the posts across various social networks
• The ‘figure‘ ‘0‘ is also very frequently used in the posts to show the lack of ‘runs‘ scored

Sentiment Analysis

While monitoring the social media, it is also important to keep in mind the sentiments behind the words and posts that are encountered in social media posts. The Sentiment Analysis report of our social media management tool helps us understand what were the feelings of the public behind their posts.

Posts Sentiment Analysis

When we look at the Posts Sentiment Analysis, we realize that most people were neither happy nor sad about how Australia did not fare so well in the 4th test as 64% posts are neutral in nature. Though more than one quarter of the population had positive sentiments regarding how the innings had unfurled, only 10% had negative sentiments about it.

Words Sentiment Analysis

A single look at the words sentiment analysis shows that two thirds of the words in all posts were positive in nature. It shows that people appreciated the moments when Australia was not able to perform well. But also, a high portion of the words, 33%, were negative in nature which shows people did not hold themselves back while expressing their disappointment in the Australian team.

Noise Analysis

A good social media monitoring tool is one that can also show the concentration of social noise in terms of date and time. myRosys is the most comprehensive tool for social media management and also provides noise analysis. Let me show you exactly how this can be used to analyze the social noise around ‘Ashes 2015’ and ‘All out for 60’.

Hourly Noise Analysis

We can clearly see that most of the online traffic around the ‘Ashes 2015’ is around the afternoon and late night.

Post Noise Analysis

There was practically no social noise around the Ashes 2015 unless yesterday when England created history by bowling Australia all out for a mere 60 runs in their first innings. The pike in social conversations due to this event is nearly 1000% the usual.

Other Reports

Our social media management tool also pulls up examples of posts which were most positive, most negative as well as those that were most shared and re-tweeted.