Running amok

Am reading the autobiography of a cricketing great and was planning to come back to blogging here with a review of that book but events on a few cricket fields prompted me to rush my comeback. Not that any one was waiting with bated breath, but hey, this is my blog and I am entitled to my delusions of grandeur. But I digress.

At the AMI Stadium in Christchurch, India serenely marched to 392 for 4 in 50 overs. With a score like this, you’d expect the bowlers to just turn up and sew up the match. No, not in today’s times. New Zealand roared off the starting blocks, Brendon McCullum was outscored in a rumbustious opening stand, and the Kiwis lost not because of the formidable total they were up against; they lost because they had an inexperienced middle order. They still managed to score 334, in just a ball over 45 overs.

Over at Kingsmead, Durban, Mitchell Johnson treated us to a rare frightful spell of hostile fast bowling on Saturday. (No malice intended, but the sight of blood spilling from the jaw of Jacques Kallis must have been heartening to bowlers the world over.) But normal service resumed today as a rookie playing in just his second test managed a century in each innings.

The anodyne series between England and West Indies continues at the Queen’s Park Oval in Port of Spain, and while England might just win this game and square the series, it does not take away from the batsman-friendliness of the series barring the one session of shame for England. Paul Collingwood averaged a shade under 46 before the test started and Matt Prior was at 40.42. Graham Gooch ended his career with an average of 42.58, Allan Lamb finished with a Himalayan 36.09 and that epitome of grace, David Gower managed 44.25. You decide the pecking order of English cricketing greatness.

To borrow a phrase I heard Ian Chappell use long ago, is run inflation well and truly on? Do we need to recalibrate cricket the way we knew it? Or is the game on its last legs? Only the likes of Johnson and Dale Steyn can help preserve the balance. But how long can they fight the elements?

Worth reading, again and again and again

It’s an article that’s more than nine months old; it’s about a cricketer who retired about eight months ago; and it’s about the cricketer’s lesser abilities. But this article on Cricinfo keeps resonating in my mind. It’s perhaps the best article I have ever read, for its sheer ability to tickle the funny bone without stating anything except the bare facts. Even the adjectives are not over the board and are always substantiated by numbers. It’s a glorious example of brilliant wit using simple statistics, this piece on Glenn McGrath by Tim de Lisle. Stop everything and read this, if you haven’t already. If you have, another read (and another, and another) won’t hurt.

Is fast bowling fast bowing out?

Simon Hughes goes after fast bowling in Fast bowling suffers slow death in The Telegraph. Simon identifies some factors that have led to the decline of fast bowling – one-day cricket, too much cricket, flatter pitches and more protection for the batsmen. Simon also opines that fast bowlers today are probably trying to pick up too many skills – I’ll pass that comment lest I digress.

There are two points that Simon has left out. One is the changing nature of the rules of the game – limiting the number of bouncers in an over, fielding restrictions in one-dayers, the lbw rule for balls pitching outside the leg stump and the like. The second, which can be argued is part of the first, is the minimum over-rate requirement today. Back in the days when the West Indian pace quartets operated and before, they did not have the 90-overs-a-day requirement. So they were able to pace themselves, preserve their stamina and go at full tilt through the day. (As for one-day internationals, they were few and far between, and most of them happened in England and Australia, where you had light late into the day in the summer.)

Reasons apart, isn’t it time we stopped mourning the death of fast bowling? Sure we don’t have fast bowlers with averages under 23 runs per wicket. May be we don’t have too many great spells like the ones the types of Michael Holding, Malcolm Marshall, Dennis Lillee, Imran Khan and Richard Hadlee came up with. But is that only because fast bowling has fallen apart?

Perhaps. On the other hand, should our yardsticks change?

If so many rules have changed and so much development (such as it is) has been brought to bear on the game, should our yardsticks for measuring the efficacy of fast bowlers remain the same?

Let’s look at batting records for a moment. No longer is a score upwards of 400 an absolutely winning first-innings score in a test match. No longer is a sub 3.5 run-rate good enough in one-dayers. And how many centuries do we get in one-dayers today compared to the 70s, 80s and 90s? And look at the top five individual scores in tests. How many of them were scored in the last 15 years? Take away the almost unreal average of Sir Don Bradman, and almost all batting records are owned by modern day batsmen. Does that mean today’s batsmen are better than those of yesteryears?

The flip side is perhaps true for bowlers. Would Marshall have managed an average of 20.94 if he had come up against the power hitting of Mathew Hayden and Ricky Ponting on the shirtfronts of Adelaide, trying to rush through his overs in four minutes? Would Joel Garner have managed his miserly 3.09 runs per over in one-dayers if he had come up against the Powerplays and the power bats of today? On the other hand, would a Glenn McGrath have got so many wickets if he had played in an era when there were fewer test matches?

Well, I don’t want to compare players across generations, but considering the way the game has evolved, is a sub-23 average per wicket still a fair benchmark for tests? And a sub-4 runs per over in one-dayers?

I think it was Ian Chappell who once suggested that inflation happens in cricket. May be it’s time for us to inflation-adjust our measurement dimensions and redefine our benchmarks, and stop wallowing in memories of a different past.

Bev or Viv?

Today’s issue of Mint (the financial newspaper of the Hindustan Times group, in association with the Wall Street Journal) carries a story on how two actuaries have come up with a new system to calculate batting averages of batsmen in limited over internationals.

The most significant change that has been introduced is the treatment of unbeaten innings. The two actuaries Sanchit Maini and Sumit Narayanan argue, and rightly so too, that adding to the numerator but not to the denominator is not quite fair. Sanchit and Sumit use insurance principles like risk and exposure to play with the calculations.

“According to the new method, if a not-out batsman has played fewer balls than his own average (number of balls faced on an average in his career) up till that game, it is not counted as a not-out. For instance, if a cricketer has played 10 innings, facing an average of 41 balls in each innings, and remained not-out in four, but faced at least 41 balls in only one of these four innings, then he is counted as having been out in three of his ‘not-out’ innings. His average will fall because his score in this 10 innings will now be divided by nine (the number of innings in which he is considered out), and not six as it would have otherwise been.”

It doesn’t sound as complex as Duckworth & Lewis, for sure, so that’s a start. But if the ICC does take it up and starts adding more variables to it, you never know what may come out.

However, the question really is this: Do we really need different statistics to evaluate batsmen? Michael Bevan’s average is much higher than that of Sir Vivian Richards, but does even a rabid Australian think Bevan was better than Sir Viv? Sure, Sanchit’s and Sumit’s formula puts this pecking order in place, but isn’t that retro-fitting?

Any way, let me not quibble. The fun in cricket analysis lies in looking at the game through different lenses – and the number lens is perhaps one of the more interesting. Good shot, Sanchit and Sumit. Now if only you could find a useful way to measure fielding averages…

Seven Centuries in an Innings

Australia beat South Africa by 83 runs in the only meaningful encounter in Group A. This means that Australia go in with points into the Super 8.

Yes, Mathew Hayden bulldozed South Africa; yes Ricky Ponting made another big score (ho hum); and yes, Michael Clarke got among the runs. (No, Pollock and McGrath were not their usual parsimonious selves, but that’s a different story.)

But here’s a chilling statistic. Every single Australian scored at more than run-a-ball, and seven of them came out to wield the willow. Gilchrist got an even 42 of 42, Hayden 101 of 68, Ponting 91 of 91, Clarke 92 of 75, Symonds 18 of 13, Watson 14 of 9, and Hussey 5 of 3. Even in that game at the Wanderers, this did not happen.

I don’t want to sound like I’m old-fashioned and say that cricket has degenerated into a batsman’s game. The batsman is as integral to the game as the bowler. And let’s face it, from the perspective of the lay watcher (the backbone for cricket’s commercial success), Pollock’s parsimony is not half as exciting to watch as Gibbs’s six-hitting. (But then, unfortunately, I am an old-fashioned cricket fan who enjoys watching McGrath bowling in the corridor ball in and ball out.)

Is it not possible to make the game exciting for the lay watcher from a bowler’s perspective? After all, a four and a six are the main scoring shots that attract the commercial cricket fan. The wicket-taking equivalents of these are shattered stumps and breathtaking catches. The subtlety of a tight over is as interesting to watch as six boundaries (or even sixes) being hit in an over.

Alternatively, should we stop recording and analyzing bowling statistics? After all, football scores are only for goals scored, the defenders have no formal statistics to back them up. And the same is true of basketball and many of the other major games.

And with the Twenty20 World Cup coming up, it may be a good transition point for the game. It could be the end of the game as we know it, but then perhaps the game needs to reinvent itself to survive. It’s a business now, after all.

Extra Cover

Well, Ireland beats Pakistan in their World Cup game. I suppose the media is going to rate this as one of the most shocking results in the game. And while they won’t be incorrect, it is not without precedent – Sri Lanka beating India in 1979, Zimbabwe triumphing over Australia in 1983, that famous Kenyan ambush of West Indies in 1996, the controversial Bangladeshi upset of Pakistan in 1999, and Kenya’s smothering of Sri Lanka in 2003 were all upsets of significant proportions.

But what interested me into this post was something else. I was looking at the statistical review on Cricinfo and what stuck me was that in the Pakistan innings, the top scorer was Mr. Extras with 29. Which was exactly the case with the West Indies against Kenya in 1996 and with Pakistan against Bangladesh in 1999.

I’m not reading too much into this. But if you think once is interesting, twice is coincidence, and three times is a bit more than that…