Saturday 27 December 2014

New Zealand's remarkable consistency under McCullum

New Zealand have traditionally had reasonable bowlers and not very good batsmen.

Even New Zealand's best batsmen, Crowe, Reid, Turner and Sutcliffe didn't manage to hold the team together often enough for New Zealand to regularly score big scores.

Before the year 2000 New Zealand had only managed to pass 400 on 52 occasions. (roughly 10% of innings). From 2000 until the end of 2012, they managed to pass 400 on 32 occasions (roughy 17% of innings). Since then, under Brendon McCullum, they have managed to pass 400 on 12 occasions in 32 innings (37.5%).

The consistency has been remarkable.

Under McCullum New Zealand have scored under 200 in 27% of innings. The next best was Fleming with 29.3%. Under every other captain who had the team for at least 5 matches, New Zealand scored less than 200 on at least one third of their innings.

This graphic displays the difference quite well:


Under McCullum, New Zealand have scored over 400 more often than they scored over 300 with most captains.

The team's ability to score 400 regularly is actually impressive when compared globally also.

I decided to look at how often a team scored 400, divided by the number of times they were bowled out.  This eliminates situations where the match situation makes scoring 400 unrealistic, for example where a team scores 90/3 to win a match or declares for 385/7 to set up a win.

Here's the table:

Captain400'sAll Outs400s per AO
DG Bradman 16210.762
SR Waugh 36560.643
AJ Strauss 27470.574
MJK Smith 11210.524
SC Ganguly 27520.519
RT Ponting 45890.506
SM Gavaskar 21420.5
BB McCullum 12240.5
Imran Khan 20410.488
Mushtaq Mohammad 9200.45
GC Smith 501120.446
MS Dhoni 33760.434
MS Atapattu 9210.429
Waqar Younis9210.429
SM Pollock 11260.423
N Kapil Dev 15360.417
DPMD Jayawardene 17420.405
MJ Clarke 18450.4
WM Woodfull 12300.4

Some other New Zealand names on the list are Fleming, 0.298; Vettori 0.214 and Howarth 0.212.

It is still very early days, but this New Zealand team under Brendon McCullum are starting to show some real promise.