The greatest ever wicket keeping batsman.

The first article that I wrote that garnered any attention was a look at Matt Prior's career as a wicket-keeper batsman, and to see how he stacked up against some of the greats: Gilchrist, Flower and Ames. It had about 200 reads, until Jarrod Kimber tweeted out a link to it, and then it had about 1000, doubling the total number of reads that my blog had had up until that point. Then there was a rain break in the England vs India test, and one of the Cricinfo commentators decided to link to the article with "here's something to look at while you wait for the rain to clear." I was swamped. About 24000 people read that article in the next 4 hours, and my little project blog became something that people started to read.

I also included a brief comparison with MS Dhoni, which got me a couple of death threats, for daring to suggest that Prior was better than Dhoni. (My favourite was "I'm going to come to England and burn your house down, you biased English." - not particularly concerning at the time, as I lived on the opposite side of the world from England).

I'm going to attempt to play with fire again, and re-look at the question.

Over the past 6 months, I've given up my job, and gone back to university to study statistics. This post is in part me attempting to use some of the tools that I've learned in that process.

One thing that comes up when discussing this, is how difficult it is to bat and keep, and if it's easier to bat with the tail, or with at the top of the order.

To try to answer those questions, I took some information for a few keepers, and had a go at running some models on them. The list of keepers that I've looked at is: Adam Gilchrist, Kumar Sangakkara, Andy Flower, Matt Prior, Brendon McCullum, Mahendra Singh Dhoni, Mushfiqur Rahim, Alec Stewart and BJ Watling. Initially, I also looked at Clyde Walcott and Les Ames, but it was difficult to get some of the information to build the models for them, so I've left them out. I'm only looking at batting. This is comparing the batting of players who kept wickets.

The variables that I looked at were as follows:
1. Average of partnerships when they came to the wicket. For example if a player came to the crease at 20/4, this was 5, if they came to the wicket at 380/2 it was 190. For opening batsmen I used 21, as this is the median opening partnership, so it is a reasonable expectation of how difficult it is to bat.
2. How many balls have passed. If the player comes to the wicket in the 51st over, it's likely to be different conditions to coming to the wicket in the 3rd over.
3. Are they the designated keeper or not. For some players, being the designated keeper hurts their batting, but for others it has the opposite effect.

I then split the data into two randomly, created the most parsimonious model that I could with half of one particular batsman's data, and then tested it on the other half of the data. I repeated this 100 times, then took the average coefficients from the 10 models that tested the best.

There are possibly better options for how to do this, but it seemed to return reasonably sensible results.

The next thing that I did was to apply those models to a number of different scenarios, some as a keeper, and some as a batsman.

That resulted in the following graph:



The answer to the question, based on these models, is quite comprehensively Andy Flower. If you're wanting to select another one, as a pure batsman Sangakkara is your man. If you want someone to bat in a crisis, then Gilchrist is the second best option, but to grind the opposition into the dust, after, Flower, you would want BJ Watling.

I quite like the idea of thinking about players based on situations, rather than overall averages. There is certainly more options that I could look at to build the model, including controlling for opposition and location. But for now this is an interesting look at a difficult problem.

Some stats after the first test in Jamaica

BJ Watling

BJ Watling has taken 5 dismissals again. He's now joined Parore and McCullum as the only New Zealanders to have taken 5 dismissals in an innings 4 times. Ian Smith only did it 3 times.

He also leads the way in terms of 8 dismissals in a match. He's done it 3 times now, there have only been 3 other times a kiwi has done it, Once each for Smith, Lees and McCullum. He's 5th overall for that, behind Boucher, Gilchrist, Healy and Marsh. (But they all had much longer careers)

He's taken 2.296 dismissals per innings. Nobody who has kept for more than 3 matches has managed that.

He also leads the way for NZ with the bat, averaging 47.25 when he is keeping. The next best is McCullum at 34.18, followed by Blain at 32.30, Parore at 26.94 and Smith at 25.56.

Globally he's 4th of all time, behind AB de Villiers (56.96) Andy Flower (53.70) and Adam Gilchrist (only 0.35 ahead on 47.60). The guy that has traditionally been considered the best ever is Ames, in 5th. He averaged 43.40.

NZ under McCullum

New Zealand have won 4 and lost 4 under McCullum. There have not been many New Zealand captains who had a winning record. Only Fleming, Coney and Howarth have winning records, and Fleming and Coney only by one match.

Under McCullum, they have averaged a collective 33.70, which is only slightly behind the 33.99 that NZ averaged under Wright, but they were ahead of it before they came out swinging to try and get quick runs in the second innings.

McCullum has led NZ to a score of 400 in 9 out of his 15 matches. Only Steve Waugh has a better % of getting 400s.

To put that in context, New Zealand averaged 26 under Taylor with roughly the same players, despite having played in South Africa and England under McCullum.

Boult - Southee combination

In matches where they have played together, Boult and Southee have a combined average of 24.08. This puts them close to the all time great mark (McGrath Gillespie averaged 23.02 and McGrath - Lee averaged 25.32). They are clear of New Zealand's other very good combinations - Bond & Martin averaged a collective 25.01 and Chatfield & Hadlee averaged 25.39.

Peter Fulton

Fulton has only scored 306 runs in his last 10 tests, at an average of 17. However he has still averaged about 30 since he came back, which is still quite high by NZ standards. Even with these games, and the ones where he came in earlier, he's still New Zealand's 11th highest averaging opener ever, one place ahead of Guptill.

His double hundreds against England were not flukes. He was in very good form at the time. In the 21 innings leading up to them he averaged 52.7 in first class cricket. But in the 31 innings since then he has averaged only 18.7. I think it is possible for the selectors to drop Fulton despite still keeping faith in him. They need to say "you are not in great form, but we know that you are a capable player. Go away and get some runs under your belt and we'll pick you straight away."

The soft hands of BJ Watling

Here's two photo's of BJ Watling's defensive technique.

This picture is of his normal block shot. You can see that he  has a very loose bottom hand.  The bottom of it is so far forward of the bat that you can't see the grip.

Bottom hand is loose on the bat handle.

This next one is the ball that he edged and was dropped at slip. Here you see that his bottom hand is tightly onto the bat.

Using hard hands to defend.

I'm not really a batting coach, but this is something that young batsmen should learn.  If you are going to play a defensive shot, make sure you keep your bottom hand loose.  It means that if you edge it, then it won't carry to the slips. 

Match report 2nd ODI WI v NZ Kingston

Chris Gayle is too good at the moment.

The rest of the West Indian players scored 180 off 193 (incl extras), roughly 5 and a half an over. New Zealand scored 260 off 47 overs, roughly 5 and a half an over. And yet this match was not even close. Gayle is just too good.

The match had the usual ebbs and flows, but throughout it West Indies were better in almost every area.

It started with New Zealand keeping the West Indies under some control for the first 4 overs. West Indies were 1/10, and it was looking like the decision to bowl first was a good one. Then Gayle hit 3 sixes off Kyle Mills.

Despite New Zealand's fielding and bowling being a lot sharper than in previous games, the score kept climbing. For a large section of the game they were looking like they were going to get more than 350. At the other end first Dwayne Smith then Marlon Samuels kept the pressure on the New Zealand attack, occasionally scoring with big shots, but feeding Gayle the strike well.

Gayle seemed to make a special effort to attack Mills and that was probably the best battle of the match. Mills got his man eventually, but he had conceded 34 runs off the 33 deliveries that he bowled to Gayle. The other key battle was Samuels against Nethula. Nethula made life difficult for Samuels, who looked eager to get on top of his fellow spinner. Nethula held Samuels to 19 off 26 deliveries.

West Indies looked all set to explode on 227 off 37, but the New Zealand bowlers stepped up at the death. West Indies only scored 66 off the last 10 overs, a good effort on a 220 pitch, but they really should have been looking for 40 more. Not that it mattered. In the last 6 overs the New Zealand bowlers hit their lengths very well and the West Indian batsmen managed only 3 boundaries.

The New Zealand innings started off well again, having the highest opening partnership for the 4th consecutive match. But Guptill managed to keep picking out fielders. The defining feature of his play in the New Zealand summer was how straight he hit the ball. Often mid on and mid off had to stand so close together that they left gaps in the covers and at mid wicket for him to work singles. Today he managed to hit the ball directly to mid on or mid off a number of times. Part of this may have been due to the West Indian bowling plan.

One of the advantages of playing at home is that you know how a pitch is going to behave, and consequently what length is the hardest to score off. The West Indian bowlers (particularly their spinners and Sammy) bowled a shorter length than the New Zealanders. Chatting to Marlon Samuels after the match he said that that was a deliberate plan, because the pitch tended to hold up as the day went on. Perhaps the difficulty in timing the ball was in part due to this.

The major highlight of the New Zealand innings was BJ Wattling. On Thursday he looked scratchy and out of form. It was almost like he scored the runs more by good luck than good management. Today however he looked classy. It was as though his fifty in the first game convinced him that he could play at this level, and he went out today believing it. His 72* off 62 was as good an innings as you are likely to see, and was a surprise to me, because I have never seen him display that level of ability.

For a brief moment it even looked like Wattling and Oram might take New Zealand home. But 316 was always too much, and it proved to be so.

Today was the West Indies day, and Chris Gayle and Marlon Samuels' day in particular.