Batting against New Zealand at the Basin Reserve, and a sneaky bet

Wellington has traditionally been a difficult place to play cricket for the uninitiated.

The nearness to the sea means that it tends to swing in the morning. The strong winds means that it's difficult to bowl, and run between wickets. The pitch is normally sporting, and the light is often not so good for batting.

Often the bowlers find the start of the day to their liking, but as the wind gets up in the afternoon, things swing to being in the batsman's favour.

I found an interesting statistic for games at the Basin in the last 10 years.

In a teams first innings against New Zealand this is the breakdown per position:

Position	Runs	Average
1	322	23
2	419	29.92
3	600	50
4	476	34
5	436	31.14
6	394	32.83
7	478	36.76
8	220	22
9	185	15.41
10	97	8.81
11	59	8.42

The average of 50 for position 3 is greatly increased by Sangakkara's masterful 156* in 2006. Sangakkara had played at the Basin just a year and a bit earlier. If we remove this it drops to 444 runs at 37.

The interesting result is number 7. 478 runs at 36.67. Almost all the number 7's in the list are wicket-keepers. In fact wicketkeepers have generally batted very well at the Basin Reserve (averaging 38.27 vs NZ in the last 10 years)

Which (when combined with his good performance in Hamilton) makes Adnan Akmal at $17 to be the top scorer in the Pakistan 1st innings very very tempting. That's where I've put my 20c.