Why it might be a good idea to pick RP Singh

This is a dangerous post.

In a couple of hours I'll either look like a genius or an idiot.

Throughout the last 5 years the English batting lineup have played really well. Really really well. They have averaged 38.46 overall. The numbers are interesting however when they are broken down a bit:

Average	Right arm	Left arm
Pace bowling	37.63	28.55
Spin bowling	43.76	47.19

You will notice the glaring number in that list - left arm pace. Perhaps that is the kryptonite that will end the reign of the English (read mostly South African and Irish) supermen.

Quick preview 2nd Test Eng vs Ind

Just a couple of things that I notices, and a bit of quick tips for the gamblers out there.

Trent Bridge has been cruel on openers over the last few years, but it has produced lots of runs for batsmen batting at number 7.

Dhoni also has a great record in the second test of a series.

I'd look at Dhoni to score more than 40 here. I'd also look at Pietersen to do badly here, as he normally follows up a big score with a number of low ones.

I'd look closely at Prior to be the top scorer for England, and also for Dravid to be the top scorer for India, as he has good technique, and tends to shine on difficult pitches.

Does keeping influence batting?

My post a month and a bit ago about Matt Prior has generated a significant amount of interest, including one specific comment that I would like to address.

Unfortunately the poster was anonymous, but they recommended Sangakkara as the greatest wicket-keeper batsman, pointing out that he batted at number 3 and often had to come into bat in the first 5 overs. It made me wonder just how hard batting after keeping was. So I had a look at some stats...

I found 5 players who have played at least 10 innings as keeper and non-keeper: Here are their averages:

Name	Inngs keeping	Avg keeping	Inngs not keeping	Avg not keeping
AJ Stewart	145	34.92	90	46.70
KC Sangakkara	81	40.48	81	72.75
AC Parore	109	26.94	19	22.70
A Flower	100	53.70	12	35.45
BB McCullum	85	34.77	12	55.18

The last three in the list probably don't give us enough information to be able to say too much, although both Flower and Parore are curious in that they averaged better when keeping than not keeping. In Parore's case it might have been because he usually batted at 7 or 8 when keeping, and at 3 when not keeping. It also might have been that he was less confident of his place in the side when Lee Germon was the captain, and so did not bat with the same confidence. Another possible explanation was that the matches he didn't keep in were the ones where Glenn Turner was in charge of the team, and his style of coaching might not have suited Parore.

Likewise most of the matches where Flower didn't keep were at the end of his career where there was increasing political tension in Zimbabwe. This was obviously impacting him - and led to the famous black armband incident. (As an aside - Henry Olonga's autobiography, which mentions this incident "Blood Sweat and Treason" is well worth reading.) But he also might have batted better when he got a chance to have a look at a pitch after keeping.

But the overall theme of the statistics is that batsmen bat better when they are not keeping. Sangakkara is particularly astounding. His average of over 70 is impressive, especially as he is such a fluid batsman that all 72.75 of them will have probably flowed in an aesthetically pleasing manner off his bat.

It also goes to underline how fortunate we are to be living in a time with so many great wicket-keeper batsmen. All of Prior, Dhoni, Gilchrist, Flower, McCullum, Sangakkara... have been producing such remarkable numbers that they have transformed the entire position.

Test Championship

As a fan of test cricket, I often feel that it is a shame that the pinnacle of world cricket is an ODI world cup. I've often wondered if it would be possible to have a test world cup.

It always seemed ridiculous. There are three problems.

1. It will take too long.
Test cricket is a long game. The ODI world cup seems to take forever, how much longer would a test version take.

2. Diversity of results.
There are three possible results (excluding a very unlikely tie), but these results don't always tell the full story. What would happen, for example if there was rain for a day of a final.

3. Home ground advantage.
A big part of the interest in test cricket is watching how teams cope with foreign conditions. There is supposed to be an advantage for the home team, and there normally is. (Except in the disgusting case where NZ cricket gave in to the BCCI and prepared Indian pitches for the last Indian tour. - I'm still very grumpy about this)

So I've put some thought into it, and have come up with what I believe to be a realistic system that counters these three problems.

There is currently a test championship, but it doesn't really mean anything. Every 4 years or so every team plays every other team home and away. During the course of this the results are compiled and a ranking is worked out. Currently India lead this, ahead of South Africa and England.

The idea is to use these rankings to seed the teams for a 1 month test cricket championship. This championship is played in a different country every 4 years, (preferably rotating through the test playing nations) The teams involved would be the home nation, and the other seven highest teams. The eight teams would be broken into two groups of 4, based on the rankings, with 1, 4, 5 & * in one pool, and the other 4 in another pool.

The teams would play each other once, and the top team from each pool would progress through to play each other in the final.

There are many different options for points systems for first class competitions, and one of these could be agreed on for the competition. I have my own favourite, but these details could be worked out later.

To make this tournament work well a host country would need to have at least 6 test capable grounds, but 7 would be ideal. This would mean that there was always at least 6 days between two matches on the same ground, allowing the groundsman plenty of time to prepare an adequate pitch. Ideally the schedule would be set up so that the travel time between matches was not too exhausting (ie. don't have a team playing somewhere like Perth, Guyana or Chennai one game, then 2 days later in Hobart, Kingston or Ahmedabad respectively).

I put together a schedule for an ideal competition, where each team had at least 2 days between matches (normally 3 or 4) and each ground had at least 6 days between matches. With 7 grounds this took a total of 29 days. This is about as long as an average test tour, and we know that audiences rarely get fatigued by a tour, so it would be likely that the audiences would not find this too long.

By using the current ranking system to seed the teams it gives an advantage to teams that have played consistently well over the past 4 years, and it also has the incentive that at least one team misses out on the tournament each time, so there is always something to play for for the bottom teams. It also gives each team a chance of a series at home against every other team. These series will mean something, and as a result the concept of a dead rubber will disappear. No match is dead when ranking points are on offer.

So this concept deals with the three objections this way:

Too long: The whole tournament will be over inside a month.
Accounting for draws etc: Having a short round robin helps with this. Also having a NARPW component to the points system will encourage teams to declare early.
Home ground advantage: Rotating the host will mean that this advantage will be shared, and making the preceding results contribute to the seedings means that every test match counts.

What are your thoughts?

As an after thought I ran a sort of virtual competition by useing the last result between each team as the competition match. The final was won by India over England on first innings, with the curious situation of Dhoni bowling the last over with Laxman having the gloves. South Africa missed out on the final by not beating West Indies by enough to get past England.

Greatest wicketkeeper-batsman?

I noticed that Matt Prior was unbeaten on 73 off 83 overnight in the test match. That leaves him with an average this year of 191.

I've commented in previous posts about how good his activity rate is, and also how good he is at converting a start. But now I wonder how he compares among the greatest wicket-keeper batsmen.

The stats are quite interesting. First here is the overall averages for the last 5 years:

Name	matches	innings	runs	average	strike rate	100's	50's
MJ Prior (Eng)	42	62	2221	44.42	64.58	4	17
MS Dhoni (India)	44	67	2403	40.72	57.37	3	17
BJ Haddin (Aus)	32	54	1905	39.68	58.74	3	8
BB McCullum (NZ)	28	50	1699	36.14	61.64	3	9
HAPW Jayawardene (SL)	33	44	1278	33.63	50.71	3	3
MV Boucher (SA)	45	64	1916	33.03	50.24	1	13
Kamran Akmal (Pak)	30	53	1496	30.53	63.17	2	10
TR Ambrose (Eng)	11	16	447	29.80	46.41	1	3
Mushfiqur Rahim (Ban)	21	41	1116	29.36	44.39	1	6
D Ramdin (WI)	33	57	1136	22.72	49.62	1	6

He sits at the top of this table, with a better average, strike rate and 50-100 conversion rate than Dhoni. (note this is every player who played 15 or more innings as keeper - hence the exclusion of Sangakkara and AB de Villiers as they played mostly as batsmen, and the low numbers for McCullum, who has scored most of his runs as a batsman also)

So how does he compare overall:

Name	years	matches	innings	runs	average	100's	50's
A Flower (Zim)	1992-2002	55	100	4404	53.70	12	23
AC Gilchrist (Aus)	1999-2008	96	137	5570	47.60	17	26
MJ Prior (Eng)	2007-2011	42	62	2221	44.42	4	17
LEG Ames (Eng)	1929-1939	44	67	2387	43.40	8	7
KC Sangakkara (SL)	2000-2008	48	81	3117	40.48	7	11
CL Walcott (WI)	1948-1951	15	24	888	40.36	3	3
MS Dhoni (India)	2005-2011	54	82	2925	40.06	4	20
DT Lindsay (SA)	1964-1970	15	26	1000	40.00	3	4
BJ Haddin (Aus)	2008-2011	32	54	1905	39.68	3	8
AJ Stewart (Eng)	1991-2003	82	145	4540	34.92	6	23
BB McCullum (NZ)	2004-2010	51	85	2782	34.77	5	15

He is a long way behind Flower, who really was in a class of his own, but is fairly close to Gilchrist's average. But sometimes it is a mistake to assume that where somebody is in their career is where they will end up. One thing that is remarkable about Prior is his consistency. Every single year he has played test cricket he has managed to average 40 or higher. This is quite an achievement. To take in account the development of players, I looked at the averages of a number of the great wicket-keeper batsmen to see how well they were going at the point in their careers that Prior is at now.

Here is a list of the great wicket keeper batsmen after 62 innings:

Name	matches	innings	runs	average	strikerate	100's	50's
AC Gilchrist (Aus)	44	62	2940	58.80	82.65	8	16
MJ Prior (Eng)	42	62	2221	44.42	64.58	4	17
A Flower (Zim)	33	62	2145	41.25	41.78	5	12
KC Sangakkara (SL)	38	62	2365	40.77	52.34	6	7
MS Dhoni (Ind)	40	62	2176	40.29	62.24	3	17
LEG Ames (Eng)	41	62	2006	37.84		7	5

*note Les Ames did not have the number of deliveries recorded, but he scored at about 50 runs per hour, during a time when they bowled about 20 overs per hour, so rough strike rate of 85 - similar to Gilchrist.

Two things stand out from this list. One is how high Gilchrist's average is, and the second is how low Flower's average is. It shows quite clearly the difference between them in the end of their careers. Prior sits quite neatly between them, suggesting that he has the potential to join those two players that totally redefined the role of a wicket-keeper batsman.

The bottom name on that list is an interesting one. Les Ames played in a different era, when keepers often came in at number 11, and were not expected to bat well. Wisden wrote at the time of his death that he "was without a doubt the greatest wicketkeeper-batsman the game has so far produced..." He scored runs with an incredible consistency, seventeen times scoring more than 1000 runs in a first class season. If Prior can have anything like Ames' consistency and durability (he played 593 first class matches over 25 years) then his final career record could be something to behold.

How he goes in comparison to Dhoni will also be interesting to watch. Since Dhoni took over the captaincy his average has been constantly rising. Most players don't find captaincy to be helpful with their figures, but here are the averages for players who were both captain and keeper in the match:

Name	matches	innings	runs	average	100's	50's
MS Dhoni (India)	24	34	1503	50.10	3	11
A Flower (Zim)	16	30	1232	49.28	3	7
T Taibu (Zim)	10	20	674	37.44	1	5
AJ Stewart (Eng)	12	24	781	37.19	1	3

To be ahead of Andy Flower in any list is quite an achievement, and it will be interesting to see if Dhoni manages to hold his spot there.

Weighted random number generator

I appreciate XKCD as a web-comic. Being a maths teacher and general geek, a lot of his humor strikes a chord with me.



Today's one did make me think at first. How realistic is this?

Often with cricket we appreciate more than the score. A beautiful cover drive through the gap is worth the same on the scoreboard as an edge past the keeper, or a hoick across the line that is fumbled in the outfield for 4. And yet we value one more than the others.

The aesthetic of cricket is something that an amateur statistician like myself can't quantify, and yet it is part of what keeps drawing me back to the game. The sound of a well struck boundary. The battle of wits between a wily spinner and a temperamental batsman. These are more important that the wins and losses. These are why I do statistics: to somehow make my contribution to the beauty of the game.

I find it difficult to explain to people why I will give up seven hours on a Saturday to umpire a cricket match. People don't know why I would want to go and sit up on the bank at a first class cricket match. And it is really difficult to convey how much I enjoy lying in bed on a rainy winters evening and listening to cricket coverage on the radio from the other side of the world. But likewise I have difficulty explaining how numbers, patterns and mathematical relationships can be beautiful. There is a beauty in the mathematical world that matches anything that the arts can produce, and for me cricket statistics can be an overlap between these two worlds.

Often this beauty is passed over by the casual observer. The beauty of both the mathematical world and the world of the true cricket tragic are inaccessible to someone who has only scratched the surface. To the casual observer a six is more exciting than a quick single, and a T20 match where both teams score close to 200 is much more exciting than an ODI game where a team defends 175. But to the purist this is almost the opposite of true. Likewise to the general public a mathematician is someone who is good at long division, whereas most mathematicians find arithmetic almost irrelevant to what they do.

My father has a theory that the downfall of the British Empire was due to test cricket. That enjoying an activity that lasted for 5 days without producing a result induced a decline in the attitude that defined Britishness. For me this ignores the beauty in the narrative. The thing that XKCD got wrong was that the narrative isn't built in the numbers, but instead that the numbers help tell the story.

And this leads me to this blog. Am I guilty of using the numbers to generate the stories rather than using them to support them? I hope not. Normally my statistics start from a hunch about a player that I've watched, and am looking for evidence on. Sometimes they surprise me, and the surprise is often worth mentioning. (such as Dilshan and Sehwag being so good at scoring non-boundary runs.)

Ultimately I think that the XKCD comic makes an interesting point, but it misses the mark: just as this one from SMBC does:



ps: yes I understand that they deliberately exaggerated for the point of humour, but it is only funny because it contains an element of truth.

West Indies low scoring win

West Indies finally won a low scoring match.

The last time they won a match that had the first innings under 250 was in 2003. This is a long time ago.

Every other team in world cricket except Zimbabwe have managed to win at least one low scoring game in this time.

I have a theory that West Indies have always had good batsmen, but their bowling has been mostly suspect. In the few times that they have had good bowlers the have been world beaters. Now with Kemar Roach and Devendra Bishoo, they look like they have 2 x-factor bowlers, and with the excellent captaincy of Darren Sammy (possibly the first player picked largely for his captaincy since Lee Germon) they could have the makings of a good side.

However we have said that before about the West Indies. I remember Stephen Fleming saying that it was always good to play a team after they had played the West Indies, because they were always over-confident. He felt that anyone who had played the West Indies felt that they were better than they were, because they had underestimated how bad West Indies were.

A strong West Indies team is good for world cricket, so hopefully we can see them show the same fight in the rest of the series.