Cricinfo StatsGuru Database for Statistical and Graphical Analysis

Data from the ESPN Cricinfo website is available from the STATSGURU website.

The url is of the form-

http://stats.espncricinfo.com/ci/engine/stats/index.html?class=1;team=6;template=results;type=batting

http://stats.espncricinfo.com/ci/engine/stats/index.html?

class=1;team=6;template=results;type=batting

If you break down this URL to get more statistics on cricket, you can choose the following parameters.
class
1=Test
2=ODI
3=T20I
11=Test+ODI+T20I
team
1=England
2=Australia
3=South America
4-West Indies
5=New Zealand
6=India ,7=Pakistan and 8=Sri Lanka

type
batting
bowling
fielding
allround
fow
official
team
aggregate

ESPN Terms of Use are here-you may need to check this before trying any web scraping.

http://www.espncricinfo.com/ci/content/site/company/terms_use.html

However ESPN has unleashed the API (including both free and premium)for Developers at http://developer.espn.com/docs.

and especially these sports http://developer.espn.com/docs/headlines#parameters

/sports	News across all sports/sections
/sports/baseball/mlb	Major League Baseball (MLB)
/sports/basketball/mens-college-basketball	NCAA Men’s College Basketball
/sports/basketball/nba	National Basketball Association (NBA)
/sports/basketball/wnba	Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA)
/sports/basketball/womens-college-basketball	NCAA Women’s College Basketball
/sports/boxing	Boxing
/sports/football/college-football	NCAA College Football
/sports/football/nfl	National Football League (NFL)
/sports/golf	Golf
/sports/hockey/nhl	National Hockey League (NHL)
/sports/horse-racing	Horse Racing
/sports/mma	Mixed Martial Arts
/sports/racing	Auto Racing
/sports/racing/nascar	NASCAR Racing
/sports/soccer	Professional soccer (US focus)
/sports/tennis	Tennis

I wonder when this can be enabled for Cricket as well (including APIs free,academic,premium,partner ).

(Note you can use R packages XML , RCurl , rjson, to get data from the web among others).

Plotting is best done using ggplot2 http://had.co.nz/ggplot2/ or d3.js at http://mbostock.github.com/d3/, and the current status of cricket graphics can surely look a change- they are mostly a single radial plot of shots played /runs scored or a combined barplot/line graph.