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7 Mar 2011 Back to (Occasional) Blogging The Fast Bowler’s Burden A friend asked me about stats for bowlers who have appeared to dismiss batsmen, only to hear the dreaded call of ‘NO BALL!’. This is very tricky one to research. Basically, there are no possible stats, apart from occasional anecdote, before 1999. It would be interesting to know how many wickets were foregone by no-ball-prone bowlers like Bob Willis and Malcolm Marshall, but I doubt if such data could ever be gathered or even estimated. Prior to about 1968 any data would have little meaning because the back-foot no ball rule gave batsmen the time to change their strokes. However, since 1999 Cricinfo’s ball-by-ball texts allow a stab at statistical analysis for modern players. I searched for as many cases as I could find and found 148 cases in 540-odd Test matches. (There were more than 12,000 no balls). There was a ‘dismissal’ once every 81 no balls, compared to dismissals (excluding run outs) about once every 66 balls. It is certain that some cases would have been missed in the search, but I doubt if it exceeded 10%. There were perhaps one thousand no balls for which the text description is minimal, but many of these would have been minimal because nothing notable happened. Some cases are probable lbws, but an umpire’s verdict was not given. With these caveats in mind, the ‘leading’ bowler was Brett Lee with 10, twice as many as any other bowler (Morne Morkel, Ishant Sharma, and Malinga with 5). Lee as also bowled a lot more no balls than anyone else in this period, 583, ahead of Shaun Pollock on 404, but Pollock had only three no ball dismissals. A few bowlers have experienced this on debut: Lasith Malinga, Michael Beer, and (probably) CB Mpofu of Zimbabwe all suffered before taking their first Test wicket. Beer and Ravi Bopara are the two bowlers on the list who have taken fewest Test wickets (one each). Ponting and Dravid led the batsmen with 5 each, no one else more than 3. Habibul Bashar was let off twice in the first seven overs of a Test against West Indies in 2004, both times off Pedro Collins. At Christchurch in 2006, Craig Cumming topped this by being reprieved three times against Sri Lanka, though not in the same innings, and off three different bowlers. Muralitharan, curiously, had no recorded no ball dismissals, even though he bowled 209 no balls in this period. Warne, also, never suffered this fate, although he bowled only 95 no balls. I haven’t done the stats, but the impression from the list is that it is overwhelmingly a fast bowler’s burden. A Few Comments on ‘Diversity’ in the
Australian Team Basically, non-Anglo Australian international cricketers are few. I count 24 players who have played Tests or ODIs for Australia who were born overseas, but the large majority were born in the British Isles or New Zealand. More than half of the 24 played before World War II. In the early days, there were several Irishmen played for Australia, including one captain (Tom Horan), although one academic has calculated that Irishmen were under-represented in Australian cricket at the time. By the 1930s there were a number of players of Irish extraction in the Test team. It was a time of division in the team with Catholics like O’Reilly and Fingleton distrustful of Protestants like Bradman. Two Australian players have been born in “India”, Bransby Cooper (in modern-day Bangladesh) and Rex Sellers. Cooper, who played in the inaugural Test of 1877, was 100% Anglo as far as I know; Sellers was an “Anglo-Indian” who played only one Test, in 1964. Also of interest is Sam Morris, born in Hobart of black West Indian parents (from Barbados); he played just one Test, in the 1880s. Andrew Symonds, of course, has a West Indian connection. He was born in England and adopted, his biological father being from the West Indies. Dav Whatmore was born in Sri Lanka and played seven Tests. A couple of other Sri Lankan migrants (Francke, Goonasera) have played at state level. Even the children of non-Anglo migrants seem to be rare in Australian cricket. Perhaps the most prominent is Len Pascoe (14 Tests), born Len Durtanovich. Andrew Zesers had a Latvian-born father, but he never quite made the Australian team. Jason Krejza has a mother from Poland and his father was a footballer from Czechoslovakia. There are a number of other players from non-Anglo families who could be named. Typically, these players had grandparents rather than parents born overseas. Pre-War, there were a few Germans, Otto Nothling, AE Hartkopf, HC Nitschke, and Hans Ebeling, who became an important administrator. More recently, there has been Mike Veletta, Julien Wiener, Tim Zoehrer, Michael Di Venuto, Dirk Tazelaar, Michael Kasprowicz, and Carl Rackemann (German grandfather), Simon Katich (Croatian grandparents), among others. There are other ethnic names I don’t know much about. Graham Manou (a Belgian name), Phil Jaques (parents are English), Nathan Hauritz, Adam Voges, Ashley Noffke. Interesting recent additions to overseas-born cricketers have, of course, been Moises Henriques (Portugal) and Usman Khawaja (Pakistan). Here is a list of Australian players (Tests and ODIs) born overseas
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29 December 2010 Yes, it Was Australia’s
Worst Day Ever There was plenty of ‘gut feel’ to the first day of the Boxing Day Test at the MCG, and it pointed to the worst day anyone could remember for Australia. I wondered if this could be measured, so I looked at days where Australia had spent time both batting and bowling, and compared averages. Sure enough, there was nothing to really compare with a batting average of 9.8 (98 all out) and a bowling average of 157+ (157/0). There have been a couple of days where a big Australian collapse has been followed by opposing batsmen running amok (such as the second day of the Gabba Test of 1985/86, where Richard Hadlee finished Australia off), but in those cases most of the collapsing came with the tail, the top order having been out the previous day. The only comparisons I could find were the first day at the WACA in 1992/93 where Australia were out for 119 (including a spell of 7/1 by Curtley Ambrose), and the West Indies replied with 135/1. At Port-of-Spain in 1995, Australia were out for 105 and West Indies scored 98/1. Neither quite compares to the Boxing Day debacle. Indeed, even in the age of the minnow there are few comparisons. Looking at the first days of Tests, Bangladesh have had a few (in Colombo in 2001 they were out for 90 and Sri Lanka scored 246/1 on the first day), and Zimbabwe was once out for 54 while conceding 340/3 to South Africa, at Cape Town in 2005. But the only exact parallel to Australia’s plight, where no wickets were taken at all, was in Hamilton in 2001, where Pakistan were out for 104 and New Zealand scored 160/0. Australia’s MCG debacle was actually slightly worse than this. In taking no wickets and ending the day 59 runs behind, Australia arguably suffered the worst first day by any team in any Test match. Speaking of worsts, Mitchell Johnson came up with one in Brisbane. He scored a duck and took 0 for 170 in the match. These are the worst bowling figures by any Australian who also batted and made no runs; indeed, the bowling figures match Geoff Lawson (Perth 1986) as the worst match figures by an Australian in any Test (though Lawson managed 13 runs). Only Paul Adams of South Africa, with a duck and 0 for 173 against West Indies at Cape Town in 2004 has done worse than Johnson by this measure, although I think that Salim Altaf with a pair of ducks and 0 for 145 at Melbourne in 1976/77 still takes the cake for worst all-round performance in a Test. |
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14 December 2010 Looking at Speed In spite of having vast reserves of data on batting times, I have never calculated career batting speeds for most batsmen in terms of runs per hour. There are lists of fastest and slowest batsmen in the relevant section of this blog, but those tables use runs per 100 balls as the yardstick. Certainly balls faced is the better comparison from a statistician’s point of view, but there is something to be said for looking at speed in terms of time as well. From a spectator’s point of view, a century in two hours is usually more exciting than a century in three hours, even if the difference is due to slower over rates in the latter case. A comparison of scoring speeds in terms of time will give us an idea of the impact that specific batsmen had on those watching. So here, belatedly, is the list of the fastest batsmen in Test cricket.
Minimum 1000 runs. Lower order batsmen in italics. The list is dominated by bats from earlier eras, because a lot more balls were bowled in each hour in those days. Still, a list like this shows why the likes of Victor Trumper, Frank Woolley and Stan McCabe achieved such enduring fame. The fastest modern batsman, Shahid Afridi, has to settle for 10th place. The list of slowest batsmen has a more modern look, although there are few very recent batsmen. The slowest batsmen of all come from the 1970s and 1980s, an era when over rates had already fallen, but before the evolution of modern heavy hitting, super bats and smaller grounds. It is notable that only one of the batsmen on the slow list scored more than 2000 runs in Tests.
Take it from someone who remembers, Chris Tavare’s claims to be the “dullest batsmen of all time” are quite convincing. |
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24 November 2010 Readers’ Notes At the suggestion of reader Arjun, I took a look at Chris Gayle’s recent triple century against Sri Lanka, and found that Gayle probably broke a long-standing world record. Gayle hit 143 of his 333 runs off one bowler, Suraj Randiv (known, confusingly, as HKSR Kaluhalamulla on Cricket Archive). This is the most runs (known) by one batsman off one bowler in a Test innings, beating the 136 by Len Hutton off Chuck Fleetwood-Smith at the Oval in 1938. The Gayle case is particularly remarkable in that Randiv only conceded 183 runs in the innings (Fleetwood-Smith conceded a record 298). Most runs by one Batsman off one Bowler, where known
The sources for this sort of record are, of course, incomplete. Two notable innings lacking data are Jayasuriya’s 340 in 1997/98 (Chauhan 1/276), and Javed Miandad’s 271 against New Zealand in 1988/89 (Boock 1/229). However, in both of these cases, it is unlikely that Gayle’s figure would be exceeded, because there were so many runs scored by other batsmen in those innings, and this would dilute the head-to-head bowling figures. But it is possible: one extraordinary case not quite on this list also involves Suraj Randiv. Just a couple of months ago, Sachin Tendulkar hit 105 runs off Randiv’s bowling in an innings of just 203. Almost every other known case of ‘head-to-head centuries’ involves batsmen making triple centuries. Randiv is the only known bowler to suffer two such centuries in separate innings, although Khan Mohammad conceded more than 100 to both Sobers and Conrad Hunte (260) in 1958. Another reader, Martin, noted that on 15th November this year, five batsmen reached Test centuries (Gayle, McCullum, Harbhajan Singh, Kallis and Amla) and asked if this was unique. I found just one precedent, 30 Aug 2001. Funnily enough it ranks only 94th for total runs in a calendar day at 692 runs (#1 is 1086 runs on 8 Dec 2001), but there were five centuries. Four of them came from a whacking Pakistan was inflicting on Bangladesh. There was almost a sixth century. Mahela Jayawardene finished the day on 95 not out. A Record Falls, But When? Sometime during the recent India/Australia Test series, Allan Border was surpassed as the batsman who faced the most balls during a Test career. But this time it wasn’t run-record holder Sachin Tendulkar who took the record, but Rahul Dravid. The existence of this record was noticed by a few people, but without noting that the Border total was incomplete, so the series when Dravid went past Border was misidentified. There are four innings by Border for which balls faced are unrecorded, at Chennai in 1979/80 and Bridgetown in 1984, worth 78 runs. Based on his batting times and the over rates for the missing innings, this equates to about 270 balls faced, about 1% of Border’s total, which comes to about 27,275 balls faced (plus or minus 50 shall we say). During the recent series against Australia, Dravid went from 27,135 to 27,357 balls faced. Tendulkar finished the series on about 26,185 balls faced. Beyond this, it should be noted that there are numerous examples of balls faced figures from the 1970s into the 1990s being incorrect. So while we can now be sure that Dravid now holds the record, exactly when he went past Border may never be known. Dravid has also batted longer than anyone else, more than 650 hours at the crease. UPDATE: Shahzad has kindly provided balls faced for the Kanpur Test of 1979/80. This raises Border’s known balls faced to 27,166, plus an estimate of about 124 balls for his one unknown Test. Border’s total is 27,290 balls plus or minus about 20. Unfortunately, the innings where Dravid surpassed this still cannot be pinned down, because Dravid played a couple of short innings (13 off 28 balls and 1 off 7, followed by 21 off 53) when he was just in this range. |
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13 November 2010 Of Spellings and
Pronunciations I had been a bit puzzled as to why Mutiah Muralitharan, after many years in international cricket, had expressed a wish to change the spelling of his name, to Muralidaran. Some authorities have gone along with this, although Cricinfo and Cricket Archive still use the old spelling. Apparently, Murali’s birth certificate and passport both (reportedly) use the latter spelling. So where did the ‘th’ spelling originate? Reader Mahendra has helped here, pointing me to an article in the Sri Lanka Daily News in 2007. It is by Dinesh Weerawansa, and I will quote at length in case the original disappears. In the late 80s I took particular interest in going to the Air Force
grounds at Katunayake to witness a school cricket
match. Making use of my Saturday off day, I peddled [sic] all the way to Katunayake
from my hometown of Negombo. It was a less important inter-school game between Maris Stella
College, Negombo and St.Anthony’s
College, Katugastota. But I had a person to meet,
of course without an appointment. He was a young cricketer who was a member
of that St. Anthony’s side. Having joined the ‘Daily News’ as a cub reporter, I was in-charge of
school cricket since 1987. I occupied the entire inner back page of Tuesday’s
paper with my school cricket review, which was sub editored
by my dear friend, the late Marianne Decker. There was an Antonian cricketer who had
been going great guns but even the sports reporters did not know the exact
way he spells his name. The intention of my ride to Katunayake
was to meet the emerging schoolboy cricketer and find how he spells his name
and pronounces it. His first name was spelt it different ways in different newspapers -
Some called him Muttiya, Muttiyah,
Muttiah, Muttiyaa or Mutiaya. When it came to his surname, it was still worse
- Muralidharan, Muralidharam,
Murralitharan, Muralitharan
or even Muralitharam. On that particular evening
after the match, I met this young schoolboy to find out the correct spelling.
Ever since, I used that correct spelling in all my school cricket
write-ups. It was this young schoolboy who has now become a household name in
Test cricket. e is the man who accounts for the world record for most number of
Test wickets - Muttiah Muralitharan.
Muralitharan showed the makings of a world beater
right from his early days as a schoolboy cricket. On two successive
inter-school seasons, he aggregated over 100 wickets each. So the source of the original spelling was Murali himself. The confusion arises mainly because names in Sri Lanka are normally rendered in different alphabets, in Sinhalese or Tamil. As with Urdu in Pakistan, conversion to English/Latin can be an inexact matter. For one thing, ‘th’ in English has two distinct pronunciations, as in “thing” and “this”. Beyond the soft ‘th’ lies ‘d’, which is why “this and that” becomes “dis and dat” for some non-native English speakers. The ‘th’ or ‘d’ in Murali’s name is probably somewhere in between, and I suspect that a completely correct pronunciation would be difficult for English speakers. The vowels, also, would be tricky. Anyway, Murali#aran recently joined another exclusive club when, batting at #11, he hit the winning runs in an ODI against Australia. He had previously been involved in a one-wicket ODI win, but did not hit the winning run. Considering that there have now been more than 3,000 ODIs, it is rare thing. I recall Glenn McGrath once saying that one of his goals was to one day hit the winning run in an ODI, but he never quite managed it, at least not from #11. Number 11 batsmen
who have hit the winning run in an ODI
Mason and Gillespie, I think, are the only ones to do it off the last possible ball of the match. Some New Records Blogging is a great way to get to the bottom of some tricky records. I just have to be tolerant of accepting correction. Last week Sreeram found a new record session score. This week reader Shahzad has added to my lists in two categories. There are two additions to the list of most boundaries in a half century: GF Labrooy (60) 9 fours 2 sixes SL v NZ Auckland 1990-91 B Yardley (74) 9 Fours 2 Sixes A v WI Bridgetown 1977-78 Shahzad also has a new record for the most no ball calls in a Test innings (see 24 October) 53 Pak(435) v WI Georgetown 1987-88. Will post these lists in my “Unusual Records” section so that any future updates can be made. UPDATE: Allan Knott hit 12 fours in reaching 52 against Pakistan at Edgbaston in 1971. He is the first known player to do this. He reached 101 with 21 fours – also unique at the time – and was out for 116 with 22 fours. His 18 fours in his first 78 runs may be unique. Spellbinding Underwood Speaking of adding to existing lists, I came across an incredible bowling spell by Derek Underwood in the Lord’s Test of 1969 against New Zealand. Underwood took 7 for 32 in the final innings, but I also discovered that his seven wickets were clustered together for a cost of only eight runs, (although it spanned 113 balls). Underwood also took 6 for 4 and 5 for 2. All of these spells belong in the Best Bowling Spells section, and rank very highly. None of these figures, curiously, made their way into reports in Wisden or The Times. It would have been easy to miss, because no fewer than 80 runs were scored while Underwood was collecting his seven wickets. Underwood’s parsimony in that part of the innings only comes to light thanks to the surviving scorebook. In this innings, Glenn Turner carried his bat for 43 not out. Apparently he played Underwood with relative comfort, but he was criticised for not trying to protect the other batsmen, who were all at sea. Turner faced only 83 of the 186 balls that Underwood bowled. |
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4 November 2010 Updates The “Hot 100” page, the fastest and slowest batsmen in Test cricket, has been updated. This is only updated occasionally now, since I have found that the lists only change slowly when you are considering whole careers over the entire history of Test cricket. Still, there is some new data behind the averages. To calculate batting speeds, balls faced are used wherever possible; currently, this is available for about 86% of all innings. For innings where balls faced are not known, an estimate based on batting time and the prevailing over rate is substituted. Batting times have been found for more than 99% of all Test innings, so for most players, a reasonably comprehensive calculation of batting speed is possible. While the all-time list changes only slowly, there are some notable developments. Virender Sehwag’s speed continues to rise; he has overtaken Kapil Dev, and he will soon overtake Adam Gilchrist for second spot at the rate he is going. Sehwag has scored at almost 99 runs/100 balls over the last two years, and equally incredibly has averaged over 60. Tillekeratne Dilshan has risen four places to #9 on the list, pushing Andrew Symonds out of the top 10. Equally notable is Ross Taylor, who has gone from #33 on last year’s list to #16. There are so many current players on the fast list that one wonders about a need to ‘adjust’ the figures to allow for the super bats and smaller grounds. Perhaps one for future study. There are no current players at all on the slow list. The slowest player who batted during 2010 is Misbah-ul-Haq, on 38.8 runs/100 balls for his whole career, ranking 358th out of 497 qualifying players. Likewise, the “Most Tenacious” list – the players with the longest average innings – is little changed. Bruce Mitchell of South Africa has slipped down the list slightly, as a bit more information has come to light. Record Identified Reader Sreeram has made a good pickup, finding a new record for most runs in a two-hour Test match session. It came on the day, at Old Trafford in 1936, where most runs were scored (588). Previously, I had not been able to find a mention of the score at tea on the second day (in spite of checking five or six contemporary newspapers), and I had presumed that there had been an early tea on change of innings, but now it transpires that India went to tea on 69/0, after England went from 400 at lunch to 571 when they declared. That gives 240 runs in the session, beating the 236 by Australia in Jo’burg in 1921. England, for good measure, had scored 227 before lunch, in a 150 minute session. Unfortunately, it is still not possible to determine exactly how many overs were bowled in each session, or on that day as a whole (approximately 140). The 236 by Australia remains the record for one team in a two-hour session, while the record for extended sessions is still 249. See the lists here. |
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24 October 2010 Crossing the Line I recently came across a couple of extreme cases of no-balling, dating from the 1988/89 West Indies tour of Australia. This was a time when the no ball plague, set off by the front foot rule introduced in the late 1960s, reached its peak. Since the 1990s, the frequency of no balls has subsided a little, although outbreaks still occur. There is usually a difference between the number of no balls given in the sundries and the number of no ball calls (by umpires) in an innings. Finding out the latter is not so straightforward for Tests before 1998, since we need to know the number of no balls that were scored from. Original scorebooks help here, though they have to be examined carefully. Generally there will be more no ball calls than no ball runs, but the number of called no balls can be reduced if there are cases of ‘four no balls’ etc. I have pieced together a list of the most no ball calls in an innings. The first innings on the list, at the WACA in 1988/89, saw an unusual number of scoring shots off no balls, fifteen in fact, lifting the no ball count from 35 to 50. The West Indies also conceded 37 no balls in the second innings of that match, but there were ‘only’ 38 no ball calls.
The figures in brackets are estimates, based on the total number of balls faced by batsmen. There are a couple of other candidates for this list, for which the balls faced data do not make much sense, so they are not included. Sri Lanka in 1992 had good reason to regret overstepping 71 times in the Colombo Test against Australia. Australia conceded only 14 no ball calls, and won the match by 13 runs. The Closest Tests India’s one-wicket win over Australia at Mohali was a rare enough thing, but was even more unusual in that both innings were closely contested, with only 23 runs between the teams after first innings. The list of Tests that were extremely close on both first and second innings is extremely short. Tests won by 10 runs or less or one wicket, that were close on first innings:
At the Oval in 1890, England beat Australia by 2 wickets after leading by 8 runs on first innings, and at Perth in 1977/78 Australian beat India by two wickets after being behind by eight runs. Honourable mention to the drawn Melbourne Test of 1974/75 where the scores were 242, 241, 244, and 238/8. |
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25 September 2010 Take Five Before Lunch The scoring of a century before lunch on the first day of a Test is a fairly familiar record, at least to Australians, mainly because three of the four batsmen to achieve the feat were indeed Australians. It is also vanishingly rare, and it has been done only once since 1930 (Majid Khan in 1976). The decline in over rates has made it ever more difficult to repeat; even Virender Sehwag at his most Jessopian has not (quite) managed it. Notable pre-lunch performances by bowlers is a far less familiar field. By chance, I came across two remarkable instances recently (20 August entry), and so I decided to create a list of most wickets by a bowler in the first session of a Test match. Like its batting equivalent, five wickets is very rare, especially since 1920, although not quite as rare as a batting century.
** on Test debut Nice to see SF Barnes (perhaps the greatest of bowlers) on the list (Barnes once took eight wickets before lunch, but that wasn’t on the first day of the match). Valentine on debut is perhaps the most extraordinary, since he didn’t even open the bowling: Maninder Singh, bowling at #4, is the only other non-opening bowler on the list. Curious to see two New Zealanders achieving the feat only months apart in 2005. Graham McKenzie took his first five wickets in the first 45 minutes of the match, and for good measure forced another batsman to retire hurt. As always, suggested additions to my lists are welcome. Note the update below in the previous entry on boundary hitting. |
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5 September 2010 The Worst Scorebook in
the World Perhaps an exaggeration, but such was my thought on seeing the official scorebook for the third Test between West Indies and Australia in 1991 at Port-of-Spain. I have uploaded a sample of this score here (bowling page from Australia’s first innings). For reasons unknown the scorer has used pointlessly minuscule writing for much of the innings, so small that it would have been possible to fit one thousand overs onto the page. The writing is clumsy, sometimes near-illegible, and the overs have not been placed in any rational order. For example, after headache-inducing research, I determined that Malcolm Marshall’s 18.1 overs are placed in the following order:
There is an additional (20th) over marked, which is completely spurious. I don’t know what it is doing there, or why the last five balls of his 19th over seem to be filled in, when the first ball had finished the Australian innings. There must be armies of amateur club scorers out there who would be embarrassed if they produced work like this. And this is supposed to be the original source for the data and statistics for a Test match less than 20 years ago. As a matter of interest, a couple of years ago I came across a memo in the SACA archives, from an Australian statistician, complaining about the state of this very scorebook (I wish I had taken a copy of the memo). I can only concur. I do know that on the next couple of tours (1995, 1999) a scorer was sent with the Australian team, rather than rely on local scorers. (I might add that many scores from the West Indies are in a much better state. For example, the 1965 tour scorebook, recorded by locals, is quite sound.) There are ‘issues’ with other scores from this tour. To cut a long story short, it confirms a point I have made earlier; that balls faced data for batsmen recorded before the computer age are only approximately reliable. A quick look at three independent sources for balls faced for the fifth Test of 1991 shows significant differences, and a full re-score of the scorebook produces different figures again. At least in the re-score the total of balls faced reconciles with the number of balls bowled, which cannot be said for the other sources. Don’t Bother Running Most of the records for concentrated boundary hitting, i.e. high percentages of scoring in fours and sixes, have been set in modern times, thanks to improving bats and smaller grounds. So it was interesting to come across some detail on an innings by Roy Dias of Sri Lanka in 1982, which represents an earlier extreme case of boundary hitting. The Sri Lanka Daily News says that Dias, batting against India in Madras, reached his half-century with 12 fours. Now sometimes reports like this are misprints, but this one is supported by an earlier statement that Dias hit six fours in his first 25 runs. So I put together a list of the most extreme cases of boundary hitting in a half-century that I have come across. Only a handful of these dates from before 1998.
And a very unusual one
Arguably the most extreme example is by Herschelle Gibbs in 2001, 48 of his first 50 runs in fours, although the freak innings by Tim Southee exceeded all the other boundary tallies, with 50 out of 53. Reggie Spooner in 1905 only received 5 runs for his “six”; with modern scoring, he would have registered 46 out of his first 50 in boundaries. Dias, incidentally was playing in what was only his country’s fifth Test match. UPDATE: Mohan and
Sreeram have suggested some additions to the list. Gus Logie (81) hit 12
fours in his first 53 at Lord’s 1988. Saurav Ganguly reached 51 with 10 fours and a six at Hamilton on
1999 on the way to 101, as did Viv Richards (114)
in his century against England at St John’s in 1981. RS Kaluwitharana
hit 12 fours in his 51 against Zimbabwe at Colombo in 1998. Cricket Archive
gives Madan Lal 11 fours and a six in his 52*
against Pakistan in Karachi in 1982, which would surpass Southee’s mark. However, this figure is in doubt. The
Times of India report says Madan hit 10 fours and a
six, and also specifically mentions strokes for 2 and 1, which would preclude
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20 August 2010 A handful of small items... Historical research into cricket statistics can be, at times, a little dry, I must admit. But occasionally there are moments of amusement. I got a chuckle out of this particular headline, from the Times of India in 1989 (copied from a microfilm). Speaking of unique innings, Ravi Shastri managed one at Eden Gardens in 1987. He was bowled by Abdul Qadir on the second ball he faced, having scored five runs off his first ball thanks to overthrows. This is the highest-known score by a batsman out second ball, since I haven’t found any cases of a batsman hitting a six and being out second ball, although Sanath Jayasuriya scored six not out from one ball against England in 1993. More than 40 batsmen have been out second ball and scored four. UPDATE. Mohan has pointed
out a contender. In the dying moments of the 1955 Kingston Test, Frank King,
fresh to the wicket, hit a six off Ian Johnson and was out next ball. It is
not clear that the six was off his first ball faced, but it may well have
been. Frank Worrell had been out earlier in the same over, and Ray Robinson’s
notebook gives King a time of 2 minutes. Maninder Singh took five wickets in his first 33 balls at Bangalore in 1987 against Pakistan, in the first session of the match. The wickets came in the space of 26 balls. (There is a list of the known records in this category in the entry on the 26 April.) Given that the previous eleven Tests between the two countries had been drawn, accompanied mostly by severe boredom, Maninder’s breakthrough must have astonished spectators and fans. Even so, it was Pakistan who won the match, by 16 runs, after being bowled out for 116. Only twice in the last 100 years has a team been bowled out for less on the first day and gone on to win the match. Graham McKenzie took five with his first 34 balls at the MCG in 1967/68, and forced another batsman (Rusi Surti) to retire hurt. McKenzie opened the bowling, and his wickets were all taken in the first hour of the match. Update on Umrigar. I mentioned last year (December 9) that ‘Polly’ Umrigar had scored a century in a session, previously unrecognised, at Port-of-Spain in 1961/62. I didn’t have an exact figure but can now confirm that Umrigar went from 63 to 172 between lunch and tea, 109 runs. The tally benefited from the extension of the session by 30 minutes when the ninth wicket fell just before the scheduled tea break. A Note on Consistency There have been a couple of items recently where the subject of measuring a batsman’s consistency has cropped up. There was a paper in the Journal of Quantitative Analysis of Sports by Booroah and Mangan, kindly sent to me by Shekhar, and an item on Cricinfo by Gabriel Rogers referred to by Dave Barry. I suppose I could get into the arcane of the statistical methods but one, much more basic, question is more interesting to me. The question is : is a ‘consistent’ batsman better or more valuable than an ‘inconsistent’ batsman? Although the answer might seem obvious, in my opinion it is not obvious at all. The trouble is, when a cricket commentator criticises a batsman for being ‘inconsistent’, he is not talking about the same thing that a statistician might assume. The commentator will almost always be referring to a batsman who fails frequently. Such inconsistency will be reflected in the player’s batting average. You will never hear a batsman being criticised for inconsistency after he scores a double-century, yet such a score will greatly increase a statistical measure of inconsistency. It is not at all clear to me that a batsman who makes many half-centuries is more valuable than another, with the same average, who makes many single-digit and triple-digit scores. Indeed, the latter batsman will play more really memorable or match-winning innings. Of course, which batsman is more valuable will vary depending on match circumstances. So I disagree with downgrading a batsman’s average just because his scores are unusually variable (I don’t think that Rogers actually argues this, but Booroah and Mangan seem to). Rogers finds evidence that high averages correlate (rather roughly) with consistency, but has not yet shown that consistency is as useful as batting average as a measure of batting achievement. Consistency is an interesting characteristic of a player, but not a measure of overall quality. |
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30 July 2010 One More Record for Sachin Sachin Tendulkar’s 48th Test century, against Sri Lanka the other day, came just a few days short of the 20th anniversary his first Test century, a 119 against England at Old Trafford in 1990. (Coming before his 18th birthday, that first century made him the youngest Test century maker up to that time, with the questionable exception of Mushtaq Mohammad). This extraordinary timespan puts him ahead of Bradman by this measure of Test match longevity. I wondered who had had the longest careers at the top, as measured by their ability to score centuries. The following table resulted...
It is notable that the next five careers on the list all included long wartime interruptions. The list is also notable for the relative absence of other recent cricketers; none of the next eleven players is a contemporary to the Little Master. Vijay Merchant is an interesting case, in that he scored only three centuries in his Test career, two of them coming in his last two innings but five years apart, in the days when India played very few Tests. Note that most of the dates refer to the first day of the respective Test matches, rather than the day each century was scored, so the figures are not exact. A Tale of Two Triples My ongoing Test studies have recently passed through 1965 and into 1966, and have included two triple centuries, by John Edrich 310* off 451 balls at Headingley in 1965 and Bob Cowper 307 off 589 balls at the MCG in 1966. These innings came only eight Tests apart. The latter innings has a touch of personal interest, in that it is my earliest clear memory of watching cricket on TV. I recall seeing Cowper, in glorious black and white, get bowled for 307, and commentator Norman May on the ABC was extolling this “magnificent innings”, and I thought, “no it wasn’t, it was really boring”. Forty-four years on, perhaps I can attempt a more sophisticated analysis. The innings are similar only superficially. There are major differences in the detail of the scoring strokes. Edrich’s innings, with 52 fours and five sixes, remains the richest Test innings ever seen in terms of boundaries, quite surprising given the modern penchant for heavy hitting. Cowper, by contrast, hit only 20 fours, the fewest for any triple century, and the ten fours recorded in his first 200 is the lowest for any double century as well. The key to this was the difference in ground conditions. Contemporary reports talk of the “lightning” outfield that Edrich enjoyed, comparing it to the conditions exploited by Bradman in his 309 in one day in 1930. Edrich hit only three threes, and none at all in his last 190 runs. At the other end Ken Barrington’s first 50 included ten fours and a rare hit for seven runs. By contrast, the MCG outfield that Cowper contended with was beyond dead slow. This was seen even on the first day, when the England batsmen hit ten threes before striking the first boundary. On the third day, Australia scored 234 runs for one wicket with only five shots reaching the boundary all day; another five fours were all-run. In addition to his two all-run fours, Cowper hit a record 26 threes in his innings, and had 167 scoring shots to Edrich’s 115. The number of scoring shots by Cowper is not especially unusual as triple-centuries go, but Edrich’s total is extremely low. So in spite of scoring his runs 32% faster than Cowper, Edrich actually scored off a lower percentage of the balls he faced, scoring off 25.5% of his balls faced to Cowper’s 28.3%. This shows, that at the very least, Cowper was not guilty of the defensiveness that a twelve-hour triple century might suggest. The lack of boundaries was also uncharacteristic of Cowper, in spite of the fact that he never hit a six in his Test career. In his other Test innings, Cowper scored a healthy 47% of his runs in boundaries, vs 43.5% for Edrich. Conclusion? Cowper’s lack of boundaries, and Edrich’s surfeit, were largely the product of local conditions. One can actually take Cowper’s 167 scoring strokes and distribute the ones, twos, threes and fours into the same proportions struck by Edrich. This a very theoretical exercise, but it produces an adjusted score under “Headingley” conditions for Cowper of, wait for it, 445 runs! I calculate that Cowper ran over 8500 yards between the wickets during his innings, not including any running done for shots that reached the boundary. Edrich only ran about 3700 yards. |
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20 July 2010 Big First Partnerships Earlier this year, Alviro Petersen
scored a Test century on debut. This is not especially rare, but he was also
involved in a double century partnership (209 with Hashim
Amla) The highest partnerships involving a batsman playing his first Test innings are 429 by Jacques Rudolph (against Bangladesh, ho hum) and 281 by Javed Miandad against New Zealand in 1976 (with Asif Iqbal). However, neither partnership was the very first for those batsmen. The highest debut partnerships are as follows
The Khalid Ibadulla/Abdul Kadir partnership us unique in that both players were making their Test debuts. They were a curious pair. Abdul Kadir played his last Test only a few months later, while ‘Billy’ Ibadulla’s next best score in Tests was 32, and, apart from that 166, his average was 12. Nevertheless, Ibadulla had a long and successful career in English county cricket. By a curious coincidence, Ian Redpath appears twice on the list with separate partnerships of 219, firstly on his own debut, and then seven years later as a partner of Greg Chappell. It is interesting that there is only one case from the last 1100 Test matches, but six from the first 800 Tests. In general, notable debuts are becoming rarer, mainly because players have much longer careers now (in matches played). The number of debutants per match, so to speak, is much lower than it once was. In the 1950s there were 1.55 debutants per Test. In the 2000s, it was 0.83. UPDATE: Lawrence Rowe has been added to the above table, and Petersen removed (his 200 partnership was actually his second). Thanks to Mohan for pointing out the omission. I have run the analysis again and I don’t think there are any more cases. Seymour Nurse’s first Test partnership totalled 243 runs, but this included a batsman retiring hurt. Apart from the players mentioned above, the other batsmen to be in double-ton partnerships during their debuts are Gordon Greenidge, Fawad Alam, Mohammad Azharuddin, Roger Hartigan and Wayne B. Phillips. More Scorebook Mysteries I have recently studied the official scorebook for the unique one-run victory by the West Indies against Australia in 1992/93. The score reveals an interesting irony. In 1998, the protocols for calculating scores were changed slightly. Previously, no balls only attracted a penalty run if no other run was scored from them. The current system, far more logical and perhaps 150 years overdue, adds the run regardless of other scoring. Where previously a no ball hit for four scored only four runs, now it scores five. As it happens, that Adelaide Test contained no fewer than 63 calls of no ball. Off nine of them, runs were scored by the batsmen, three by West Indian batsmen and six by Australians. There were also two other no balls, one for each side, where the batsmen ran ‘byes’ or ‘leg byes’. So under the 1998 rule change, West Indies would have scored four more runs, and Australia seven, enough to give the match to Australia! There are one or two oddities about the score, which could be critical in such a close match. I may return to this at a later time. |
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4 July 2010 The Match-Savers. Test cricket is rarely more exciting than when a last-wicket pair is trying to hold out for a draw. While success for the batting team in this situation is rare, it has been noticeable recently. It cropped up twice in one series in South Africa last season, England making the escape on both occasions, and when Monty Panesar and James Anderson held out for 69 balls at Cardiff last year it pretty much cost Australia the Ashes. I have put together a list of the longest 10th-wicket stands to force a draw in the final innings of a Test. It does not include cases such as at Cardiff, where the draw was effectively secured before the final ball was bowled (because the partnership had put England into the lead). The two-hour partnership between Allan Border and Terry Alderman in Trinidad in 1984 is in the same category. There have been 18 drawn Tests where the result was uncertain up to the final ball, not including the strange case in Kingston in 1978 when the match was abandoned by the umpires at the fall of the ninth wicket, after a crowd riot started. Only six of the 18 were achieved by the #10 and #11 batsmen batting together. Two batsmen have been involved twice, both current players: Graham Onions was involved in both England’s escapes in South Africa; Fidel Edwards has been there at the death twice for the West Indies. The drawn Tests where the last pair held out for more than 50 balls, and the result was uncertain till the final ball (this excludes Panesar and Anderson, who had put England into the lead before the match ended), are:
Discovering the number of balls involved in the famous Mackay/Kline partnership took quite some research, since these things were little-reported in those days, and no scorebook of the match survives. So I have written a piece on the details of this partnership, and have posted it here. |
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15 June 2010 More on Long Bowling
Spells etc In the Unusual Records section, the longest-known bowling spells by individual bowlers have been recorded. The list suggests that the longest bowling spell by an Australian was 51.2 overs by Tom Veivers at Old Trafford in 1964, during England’s interminable 611 off 293.1 overs. (Veivers’ spell has been reported, incorrectly, in other publications as 55.2 overs.) I was certainly surprised, then, to find that not only is this not the Australian record, but that it was not even the longest spell Veivers bowled in 1964! The Test played by Australia in Calcutta in 1964 is little remembered, partly because it was one of the first Tests in India to be ruined by rain, the last two days being washed out. In India’s innings, Veivers bowled 52 overs, and as it happened, it was in one ‘continuous’ spell (interrupted only by planned and unplanned breaks). The fact that Veivers bowled unchanged only became evident on re-scoring the scorebook (kept at Cricket NSW). The match has another statistical footnote. When Indian spinner Durani (6 for 73) ripped through the Australian middle-order and tail, at one point there were no runs at all for 78 balls. Ian Redpath held up one end. Surti and Chandrasekhar were the other bowlers involved. Another ‘new’ extreme scoreless spell emerged as I analysed the famous Mackay/Kline last wicket stand that saved the Adelaide Test of 1960/61. It appears that the last 10 (eight-ball) overs were maidens, giving a total of 80-87 scoreless balls. There were, however, some sundries, and one report mentions two runs scored by Mackay (others suggest these were byes). A full analysis of this great partnership will be posted on this blog in the near future. Also previously overlooked in Unusual Records is the bowling of Ramadhin and Valentine in Brisbane in 1951/52. In Australia’s second innings, Ram bowled 40 (eight-ball) overs and Val 40.7, with opening bowlers Worrell and Gomez contributing just 2 and 3 overs respectively. At the end of the fourth day, each bowler had bowled 22 of the 49 overs at that point, and the two spinners continued on the final morning until Australia won the match, (by three wickets, a struggle all the way). One report suggests that the two spinners’ overs came without a bowling change which, equivalent to 107.5 six-ball overs, would make it by far the longest-known spell by two bowlers (the known extreme is 86 overs by the same bowlers at Lord’s in 1950). However, given that Worrell and Gomez bowled the first four overs (Gomez taking a wicket in the fourth over), it is not logistically possible that the spin pair bowled that number of overs without change. They must have changed ends at some point, and indeed the Sydney Morning Herald states that they did, after tea on the fourth day. The report implies that this happened immediately after tea, with Gomez’ third over inserted after about 20 overs had been bowled. If so, the unchanged spell was 64.7 eight-ball overs, which would be enough for the record by a margin of just three balls. Unfortunately, none of the sources searched so far permit certainty. Ramadhin and Valentine actually took the second new ball during this innings, after 66 overs. They raised many eyebrows by rubbing the ball on the ground to scuff up one side. |
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23 May 2010 The Fastest Debut 50s In March I offered a list of the fastest-known centuries on Test debut. I can now add some thoughts on the fastest 50 on debut, sparked by the discovery of a contender from the deep past. The ultimate statement on fast debut 50s was made by Tim Southee of New Zealand, against England in 2008. Southee took just 29 balls and 38 minutes to reach his half-century. However, coming in the final innings of the match, it was not his first Test innings. For that record, we must look elsewhere. I recently obtained another set of newspaper reports (Johannesburg Star) from Australia’s first Tests in South Africa in 1902. These matches were notable for fierce scoring throughout, setting some records that still look impressive today. The series started in Johannesburg on 11 October 1902. There is evidence that the Australian players, after a long tour of England in one of that country’s wettest summers on record, would rather have been on the way home than playing on a frosty Joburg spring day. Joburg at the time was a newborn city, which 15 years before had been nothing but veldt. It is also notable for cold mornings and high altitude. On a matting wicket, South Africa scored a remarkable 428 for 7 on the first day, doubly remarkable because there was only 4 hours 20 minutes of play (88 overs). Most of the series seems to have been scheduled for only 5 hours play per day, three days per Test, the shortest schedule of any Tests ever played. Exactly why there was so little play on the first day, I haven’t fully divined from the reports. The Australians weren’t enthusiastic about their task and may have delayed the start with a practice session (there had been no warm-up or practice games, after their long journey from England). Both the bowling and fielding were described as sloppy. The batsmen certainly made up for any time limitations. South Africa was 179 for 1 at lunch on the first day (41 overs), a total that, as far as I know, has not been exceeded in a Test before or since. But it was after a tea break was taken, at 293 for 3 off 67 overs, that the loudest batting fireworks were unleashed. AW ‘Dave’ Nourse, whose career would last almost 22 years, made his debut batting at #8. A reconstruction of the innings (from five independent South African newspaper reports) gives Nourse 50 off about 40 balls in 40 minutes (ten fours), on the way to 72 off about 65 balls. In partnership with EA Halliwell (57 off about 60 balls) the eighth wicket stand was worth 124 off about 115 balls. When it comes to fast scoring in his debut innings, Nourse is a real contender. Here are the fastest such innings I know of (minutes batted, then balls faced) Fastest Half-Centuries on Debut (minutes batted)
Fastest Half-Centuries on Debut (balls faced, where
known)
** In team’s second innings |
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26 April 2010 Fast five-fers A while ago a correspondent, Peter Thompson, asked about bowlers who had taken five wickets in a Test innings very rapidly. Now there is an entry on this subject under “Unusual Records”, but the question was specifically about bowlers who have reached five wickets in an innings in the shortest period after they first came on to bowl. An equivalent to a batsman reaching 100 very quickly. The question was raised after Stuart Broad took five wickets at the Oval in 2009 after bowling only 8.4 overs (52 balls). This is quite a rare achievement in terms of recent Ashes Tests, but how does it rank over all of Test history? After searching the ball-by-ball database, and some bowling records, the following list resulted. Note that the database only covers about 1100 of the 1950-odd Tests. Fewest balls to
reach five wickets in an innings
Some – well, most – of these bowlers benefited from bowling to tailenders, and for some, including the leader Ernie Toshack, the figures comprise their entire bowling for the innings. Perhaps Trumble is a more notable achievement (even thought the wickets was a ‘sticky’) since he came on with only two wickets down, and took another wicket with his next ball, to achieve the hat-trick, and six wickets in four overs. There are no cases from 1955 to 2002. This is partly because the database is very incomplete from 1965-97, but I suspect also that it was not an era for such freakish achievements of this type. The search continues. Any suggestions welcome. UPDATE: Maninder Singh took five in his first 33 balls at Bangalore in 1987 against Pakistan, in the first session of the match. The wickets came in the space of 26 balls. Graham McKenzie took five with his first 34 balls at the MCG in 1967/68, for 19 runs, and forced another batsman (Rusi Surti) to retire hurt. McKenzie opened the bowling, and the wickets were all taken in the first 45 minutes of the match. He took 6/33 before lunch. The Slowest
Double-Century I have written on this subject before, noting that that
title of slowest Test double-century (in balls faced) is a close race. Sid
Barnes took 607 balls to reach 200 in 1946/47, but Bobby Simpson just pipped
that figure at Old Trafford in 1964. I have just completed a full re-score of
Simpson’s innings (from Dave Sherwood’s running sheets held by Cricket NSW)
and settled on a figure of 609 balls for his first 200. The scorebooks for both innings have slight anomalies; the scorers, just occasionally, did not record the full number of balls in certain overs, and it is uncertain if these were really short overs or not. However, these problems are few, and I am happy with the above result. It is possible that both these innings were shaded by Glenn Turner’s 259 in 1971/72. I have been supplied with a figure of 611 balls for the 200. However I have not seen this figure in print, and it is not found in the scorebook facsimile published with the tour book, so I would regard it as unconfirmed. It is not fully consistent with other figures from that innings. Simpson’s first 200 contained only eleven boundaries, perhaps also a record on the low side. (Grant flower’s double ton for Zimbabwe contained 11 fours and a six, Bradman’s double at Adelaide in 1936/37 had only 12 fours. Bob Cowper’s 307 at the MCG may have had only 10 fours in the first 200). It was not until he had been batting more than eleven hours that Simpson changed his approach. At one stage 230 off 684 balls in almost 700 minutes, he scored his last 81 off only 57 balls. Not out overnight on 265, he eschewed major records by swinging at everything on the third morning, adding 46 off 22 balls, and scoring off almost every ball he faced. Simpson’s final tally was 311 off 741 balls (the figure given on the running sheets is 740, added up by hand). Cricket Archive has 743 balls; don’t know where they got that figure from. |
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6 April 2010 More Scorelessness Another extreme case of a long period without scoring (see entry for 15 March) has turned up. It was during the Madras Test of 1963/64, and as such is not a great surprise, since this was the Test of Bapu Nadkarni’s record 21 consecutive maiden overs. Re-scoring the MCC scorebook reveals a very long spell without score on the third day, 79 balls in all straddling the lunch break, faced by Brian Bolus and Ken Barrington. Nadkarni and Kripal Singh each bowled a maiden before lunch, then Borde and Nadkarni (who changed ends) bowled 10 in a row afterward. There were no sundries, so this is the longest spell identified to date with no score whatsoever (the very few longer ones either definitely or probably contained sundries). Between lunch and tea England scored just 27 runs, including four byes, off 40 overs, with no wickets. Nadkarni bowled nineteen overs in the session for one run. I can confirm that Nadkarni bowled 130 rather than the reported 131 consecutive scoreless balls, spread over two spells. Just before tea Nadkarni conceded a single and The Times wryly observed he was then “taken off as though being altogether too expensive”, so Borde bowled the last over before tea (another maiden). Bolus scored 88 off 406 balls, and takes his place in the pantheon of slow scoring, though not a match for Bruce Mitchell’s 88 off 475 balls in 1929 or Alec Bannerman’s 91 off 620 in 1892. Barrington’s 80 off 313 balls was sprightly only by comparison. Their partnership of 119 off 510 balls, at 23.3 runs per 100 balls, is the slowest century partnership for which I have exact figures for balls bowled. Notes from the re-score: the first wicket appears to fall at 13 not 12. The reported stumps score on the second day requires revision, Wilson being 7 not out at sumps, not 2 not out. There are some anomalies in the scorebook that create some uncertainty about exact stats, but they do not affect the day of “interest”. There is a more notable error in published figures for the second Test in Bombay. In England’s second innings, Borde is recorded as bowling 37 overs for 38 runs, but he actually bowled only 27 overs. The scorer wrote down 37, but only 27 overs are filled in, and this is confirmed by the re-score. India bowled 124 overs, not 134, in this innings. In the first innings in Bombay, Fred Titmus scored 84 off 330 balls, reaching his 50 in 260 balls. This latter figure places well among in the Top 10 slowest half-centuries known. This was the Test where England were unable to field eleven fit players, such was the rate of injury and illness in the tour party, and only two specialist batsmen batted. Bhagwat Chandrasekhar made his Test debut in this match; those who ever saw him bat will not be surprised to learn that he was bowled by the first ball he faced in Test cricket. |
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27 March 2010 Gunn Bat One interesting Test series that is not represented by a surviving scorebook is the Ashes series of 1907/08. There is, however, a partial score of the first Test in the archive of Cricket NSW, incomplete and evidently from an amateur source. The Test was an exciting one, won by Australia by two wickets thanks to an unbeaten ninth wicket stand of 56 by Hazlitt and Cotter. The MCC team featured one George Gunn, who was in Australia for ‘health reasons’ and not part of the squad. He had never played Test cricket, but was called up only a day or two before this match when the team was saddled with illness and injury. He scored 119 on debut on the first day, a fascinating innings that has been rather forgotten. Now the strangest thing about that scorebook is while England’s first innings is otherwise complete, with every other individual innings, and every ball of the bowling analysis present, Gunn’s innings is completely absent. Hard to say why, but it appears that someone wrote down a team list before Gunn’s selection was announced, and stuck to that list! Nevertheless, it was possible, barely, to re-score this innings and estimate balls faced. Estimate is the best word, because there are a considerable number of anomalies in the score (not entirely surprising given the other problems |
