CricketGeek Player Profile: Jackson Bird

Jackson Bird

Jackson Bird is a tall right arm pace bowler from Australia.

He bowls into the wicket at a reasonable (if not express) pace, and bowls consistently in good areas. He moves the ball both in the air and off the seam.

I had the privilege to watch him make his test debut, and he looked like a very good prospect.

He was the top wicket taker in the Sheffield Shield in 2011/12 with 53 wickets and was high up the table again in 2012/13 despite only playing in 6 matches.

He did all this at with a very good average and strike rate. Part of those good figures is due to playing for Tasmania, and hence getting to play half his cricket on the Bellerive Oval, where he has taken 42 wickets at 16.19. However there are only 3 grounds where he averages more than 30 at, and at all of these he has only played one match.

CricketGeek Player Profile: James Harris

James Harris

I recently had an interesting email arrive advising me to have a look at the newest addition to the English squad: the young Welsh bowler, James Harris.

When I first looked at his numbers they were not particularly impressive. However the English selectors have recently made a habit of picking players with poor domestic records, and those players being a real success. (for more info on that see this post on the The Declaration Game.) So I felt his numbers demanded looking at more closely.

As someone who occasionally enjoys cricket betting I like looking out for some patterns in players performance to see if there is anything that can inform my betting.

The first thing I looked at with Harris was to see if there was a positive trend in his performances. He started playing domestic cricket when he was very young, so I assumed that he would be improving. However, if anything, his performances have been getting worse as the batsmen have figured him out. Here is a graph of his 15 innings average and economy rates in T20 cricket.

These are hardly the sort of thing that suggest that he is going to set the world on fire. However sometimes there is more to a player than their average.

There has been a distinct pattern to his good performances and his bad ones. He is outstanding with the new ball, but not unconvincing with the old one. For example in the English PPP tour to India he took 3/19 off 7 overs when he opened the bowling (in a 50 over match), but 0/42 off 4 in the match where he came in later on.

Roughly 2/3 of his wickets have been against top 3 batsmen, and more than half of his wickets have been taken in the first 5 overs of a match. As a result he is far more valuable than his raw figures indicate, particularly in a team with a couple of batting all-rounders, who would allow his captain the luxury of only bowling him when he was most effective (at the start of the innings).

If I was betting on a match involving Harris, I would probably look to bet on him going for few runs early in the innings, but bet on him going for a lot at the end of the innings.

Additional research by Celia Roche

CricketGeek Player Profiles: Colin Munro

Colin Munro is a left handed batsman and right-arm medium pace bowler from Auckland. He was born in Durban, South Africa, but moved to New Zealand as a teenager. His brother played youth cricket with Hashim Amla, but it wasn't until he came to New Zealand that Colin started to make a name for himself as a cricketer.

He played 5 matches for the New Zealand under 19 team, and then was picked in the Auckland team as a specialist bowler, batting at number 11. He has a strange delivery stride with his bowling, that causes the ball to skid onto the batsmen somewhat. As a result he has been an effective holding bowler, doing jobs like bowling into the wind, keeping things tight at the other end to a spin bowler, and seeing in the new ball.

Due to his aggressive batting style, and defensive bowling, he was typecast as a limited overs player, and he was worried that he had been pigeon-holed, and wouldn't play any first class cricket. He didn't play a single first class match between November 2010 and February 2012, and was stuck with a record of having played 6 first class matches, with a highest score of 37 and an average of 14.29.

However during this time he did start to score in the t20 and list A matches for Auckland, playing 18 t20 innings at an average of 30, and 18 list A innings at an average of 38.4. As a result the Auckland coach decided to give him another try in the first class team and he did not disappoint.

He hit a hundred in his first match back, and has averaged 77.54 in his 10 matches since his comeback as a batsman, with 4 hundreds and 4 fifties in 14 innings. The highlight of that time was a sensational 269* off 252 balls against Wellington, with an attack featuring 3 international bowlers.

Due to an injury to James Franklin, he's been picked to play in the 2nd test between South Africa and New Zealand at St George's Park in Port Elizabeth. It will be interesting to see if he can translate his domestic form to the international game.

CricketGeek Player Profiles: Anaru Kitchen

Anaru Kitchen with a young Aces fan

courtesy @sillymidoff

One of the main reasons that the Auckland Aces have been the dominant team in New Zealand limited overs domestic cricket over the last two years is their extraordinary fielding. Guptill, Hira, Vincent and Cachopa have all prowled the infield, cutting off singles and saving boundaries. But there's another element to their fielding that is often ignored. The exceptional boundary fielding and outfield catching of Anaru Kitchen.

He is extremely quick, and at times seems to sense where the ball is going before it even leaves the bat. The result is that he has saved a number of runs, and made a significant number of catches for Auckland. He took more catches last season than any of the wicket-keepers. In fact, he took double the number of catches of the most prolific (Kruger van Wyk).

Sometimes outfield catching is merely a case of being in the right place at the right time. In Kitchen's case it is more that he covered so much ground, so quickly, that he caught batsmen who thought they had safely hit the ball into a gap. In one game he took a catch at deep backward square leg, while fielding at a wide mid on.

His ability to take catches has seen him placed high on the list of the most consistent catchers in T20 history:



To go with his remarkable catching he is also a competent batsman. His career started with a hiss and a roar, scoring 33*, 31, 0, 31, 61* in his first 5 matches, followed by a slump as bowlers figured out where to bowl to him. This often happens to players who have immediate success when they make the step up to the next level. The difference between good players and the rest is how they respond. Kitchen has found a way to score runs, faster and more consistently after his lean patch. His career strike rate has risen above 125 and his average is now over 25 (as shown in the graph below. He still has some work to go before his batting alone would be a reason to select him, but when combined his fielding prowess, it resulted in his being named in the 30 man New Zealand training squad for World T20.

Anaru Kitchen is someone to keep an eye on in the Champions League T20, both with the bat and in the outfield.

CricketGeek Player Profiles: Colin de Grandhomme

Colin de Grandhomme with 2 young fans. Courtesy @sillymidoff

When I was a child my father had season tickets to watch the Auckland rugby team play. I went along and watched them play almost every weekend of winter. That team was amazing. They won 75 consecutive regular season home matches. They would often be so far ahead at half time that they could try crazy, high-risk plays in the second half. And they were so good that they would often come off. Throughout the time that I watched them, there were two players who, more than any others, got the crowd excited. The first was a butcher from Mangere called John Kirwan. When he got the ball the whole crowd would rise as one, because he was unbelievably good. He was so fast and elusive. Whenever he touched the ball there was electricity. The other player was on the opposite wing, Va'aiga "Inga the Winger" Tuigamala. Inga was a very good player, but was not quite as good as Kirwan. Despite that he was the true crowd favourite because what he did was often more spectacular. He had the power and balance to get through the smallest of gaps. Kirwan scored 35 tries in tests for the All Blacks, Tuigamala scored only 5, and yet was clearly the crowd's favourite.

Likewise, Colin de Grandhomme has not scored nearly as many runs for Auckland as Martin Guptill, but when CdG walks out to the middle, there is a hush of expectation come over the crowd at Colin Maiden Park. Everyone knows that there is a chance that they will see something special from the big man. He is capable of making the largest grounds look ponderously small. When he hits a ball, they certainly stay hit.

I have been fortunate to have been able to see some of the biggest hitters in world cricket. I have seen the likes of Chris Gayle, Kieron Pollard, Chris Cairns, Adam Gilchrist, Viv Richards and Mark Greatbatch; but I'm not sure I've seen anyone hit the ball as cleanly or as regularly as de Grandhomme. I once saw him hit the ball out of Colin Maiden park, over the embankment and trees, across the road, over the fence on the other side and into the university car park. I'm not good at estimating distances, but I would be very surprised if it was less than 120 metres.

His career strike rate for the Auckland in T20 matches is a fairly impressive 170.83. He has hit 42 sixes and 47 fours off only 360 deliveries. That's basically a boundary every 4 balls. He's done all this while averaging a respectable 20.

But he's not just a lucky slogger. It has been in the longer formats where he has really excelled. Last season he averaged over 70 in first class cricket, and 43.8 at a strike rate just over 125 for Auckland in the list A matches. In a lot of ways his List A and First Class numbers show how good a player he actually is.

These numbers led me to write a post about his selection for the New Zealand team pointing out that they had picked him for the wrong format. However, when those two games got to the super over, I was wishing we had CdG in the side.

The fact that he is playing for New Zealand at all is a story in itself. He was born in Harare into a Zimbabwian cricketing dynasty. Both his father and grandfather represented their nation (Bunny for Rhodesia and Laurence for Zimbabwe). He looked set to follow in their footsteps, having played for Zimbabwe under 19's (alongside Brendan Taylor, Elton Chigumbura, Tino Mawoyo, Prosper Utsya, Sean Williams, Graeme Cremer and Ed Rainsford) before going on to play first class cricket for the Zimbabwe A and Zimbabwe under 23.

However he had different ideas. Realising that Zimbabwe was not quite the land of opportunity that it had been, de Grandhomme moved to Auckland in 2006.  It took a while for the move to pay off, but now "dutchie" makes the Auckland crowd move to the edge of their seats whenever he saunters to the middle.  If he gets going in the Champions League T20, I would definitely recommend moving to the edge of your seat also.

If you want a brief introduction to his (rather understated) personality, watch this video.

CricketGeek Player Profiles: Samuel Badree

© WICB Media - Pal Pillai

I had intended to write a profile on Badree before the tournament started, but school work got in the road. Samuel Badree is possibly the most under-rated player on the planet right now. While his Trinidad and Tobago team mate, Sunil Narine has attracted all the headlines with his funky hair style and mystery deliveries, Badree has avoided the attention, despite also taking wickets and not conceding many runs.

Narine looks special. He holds the ball in a strange way. He flicks his wrist when bowling off spin. He turns it both ways. When he is bowling drama is in the air. It's totally absorbing. Badree is almost the opposite. He does get some turn, both ways, but it's not particularly exaggerated.

Badree is instead the master of line and length. He has enough variation that the batsman can't settle down, but enough consistency that if they wait for the bad ball his whole spell might have gone by and they've only had one ball to hit. For a leg-spinner that is exceptional. Narine is someone who you can't take your eyes off. At the end of a Badree over it is hard to remember anything happening. He bores the batsmen into submission. And he does it well.

His boringness is part of why it has taken so long for him to reach international cricket. He played his first match for Trinidad and Tobago in January 2002. It took until June 2012 before he made his international debut. 10 years is a long time to wait for a call up, particularly in the West Indies who seem to go through spinners faster than Hollywood celebrities go through spouses. In that time there have been 25 other players bowl at least 10 overs of spin for the West Indies.

He's only played 5 T20 internationals, so it is hard to draw much from his statistics in the international game, but he has played a lot of matches for Trinidad and Tobago, and his record for them is remarkable.

Career Economy Rate - minimum 100 overs

The most important question is really how many runs does a bowler concede.



We can see that he is unmatched in this arena. He is so miserly that if Daniel Vettori bowled 3 overs per match, and Badree bowled 4 overs per match, Badree would still average less runs per match than Vettori. Or Steyn, Ajmal, Swann, Malinga, or anyone else with an economy rate over 6.2.

Career Bowling Index - minimum 100 overs

The bowling index is found by multiplying the runs per ball and the runs per wicket. It is one of the best guides to the effectiveness of a bowler.



This time Badree is second. He's got the second best bowling index of anyone who has ever played, and the only one ahead of him, Narine, is yet to suffer second year syndrome, when he has to adapt to players figuring him out. There are a lot of very good bowlers behind him in this list.

Career bowling Contribution: - minimum 100 overs

Every wicket is worth about 5 runs to a teams total. So I subtract 5 runs per wicket, and then work out the economy rate. For more info see this post:



Again Badree's numbers are better than anyone else.

An argument can be made, of course, that it's one thing to succeed at the lower level, against players who are not very good against spin. How does he go against higher class opposition.

To answer this I looked at just his statistics in matches against teams with a heritage of spin, or from an area known for spin bowling. Generally a player who has grown up in one of these areas is likely to have developed a better technique against spin bowling. The teams that I have counted as good against spin are Guyana, Deccan Chargers, Ruhuna, Mumbai Indians, Chennai Super Kings, Bangladesh A, India A.

Against these teams he has bowled 36.5 overs and taken 8 wickets for 202 runs. That's an economy rate of 5.48. Worse than his career average, but still remarkably good. Of the bowlers who have bowled more than 100 overs, only Sunil Narine has a lower economy rate.

Likewise if we only look at his numbers against international teams he has bowled 35 overs, (some for West Indies, some for T&T in tour matches) and taken 7/182. That's a economy rate of 5.2. This would put him ahead of Narine, despite only counting matches against international teams.

Before the match Australia said that they were going to try and target Badree. That resulted in both of their openers ending up back in the shed. Bowling to Sri Lanka is a different prospect to bowling to Australia, but going by current form it seems unlikely that even the might of Sri Lanka will have an answer to scoring quickly off Samuel Badree.

He might be boring, uninspiring and easy not to notice, but his numbers are remarkable. At the end of the day a bowler's job is to take wickets and not concede many runs, and this is exactly what Badree excels at.

CricketGeek Player Profile: Elias Sunny

In July this year, Elias Sunny became the first person to be named man of the match on debut in two different formats when he took 5/13 against Ireland at Stormont. It was another notch in what has become a stellar start to his cricketing career. He also took 6/94 on test debut.

Sunny is a slow left arm bowler, but he bowls with quite an open action, so the ball comes from a slightly different angle than an orthodox left-arm spin bowler. This has given him an ability to get left handed batsmen out with more regularity than most left-arm spinners. He also turns the ball quite sharply, and tends to bowl a slightly different length than most orthodox spinners. These combine to make him a real danger man for teams playing against Bangladesh.

His different angles mean that he's likely to be a particular threat to batsmen who have not faced him before, although he has shown the ability to get out some batsmen repeatedly, notably compatriot Mahmudullah, who he has dismissed a number of times in domestic cricket.

His international T20 record is remarkable, averaging 12.22 with an economy rate of 5.50, but that is somewhat artificial, given that he has only played against Ireland, the Netherlands and Scotland. However his overall T20 record is still very good, and includes being the local player of the Bangladesh Premier League. Here is a graph of his career averages.

We can see he is settling in to an average of under 20, and an economy rate close to 6. If he can translate that to international cricket he will be a massive asset to Bangladesh, and could be part of the catalyst that they need to go to the next level.

This tournament is likely to be a good litmus test for him. We may get the chance to see if he has just had a good start, or if he really is as good as his figures would indicate.

CricketGeek Player Profiles: Glenn Maxwell

Glenn Maxwell is an exciting young allrounder from Victoria. He is a very quick scoring batsman and a handy off-spin bowler.

His recent form has been very impressive. He had a reasonable BBL for the Renegades, played a couple of games for the Delhi Daredevils, but then really shone for Hampshire in the Friends Life t20 in England.

He had the 8th highest batting index in the competition, with an average of 44.75 and a strike rate of 175.49. To add to that he took 7 wickets at an average of 25.5 and an economy rate of 7.56.

He has proven to be particularly good at hitting boundaries, scoring roughly on boundary every 5 balls. He's also developed a reputation as a great fielder.

Here are a couple of graphs of how his career t20 averages have shaped up recently.

His batting averages are going up, and generally his bowling averages are going down. This is exactly what should be happening for a quality player in his breakthrough season.

But the ultimate proof of his rise is that the Australian selectors have opted for him ahead of Dave Hussey, the highest run scorer in t20 history. How he goes in that role will be interesting. The one thing that his opponents will probably be aware of is that he has tended to get out to off-spin early in his innings. That's not exactly a good weakness to have in Sri Lankan conditions, but it also might be something that the selectors feel is just an anomaly.

CricketGeek Player Profiles: Jeevan Mendis

When talking about Mendis, the first name that comes to mind for modern cricket fans is Ajantha, the mystery spinner. For slightly older fans, there could be a number of players thought of, as there have been over 30 players called Mendis play first class cricket in Sri Lanka (and one Gehan Mendis play 366 first class matches in England). The subject of this profile, however is Jeevan Mendis.

At schoolboy level Mendis was a star with both the bat and ball for the prestigious St Thomas' School. He got a call up to play in the Under-19 team, and he continued to shine, having respectable averages of 51 with the bat and 13 with the ball.

It has taken him a while to become a regular player for the national side, but he is starting to establish himself now. In his recent domestic T20 matches he's averaged about 30 with the bat and about 24 with the ball. If he can keep this ratio up in the international level, he could become an indispensable bits-n-pieces players, like Albie Morkel, Scott Styris or Abdul Razzaq.

He relies more on placement than power with the bat, but he has a good reverse sweep, so he has the ability to create headaches for the fielding captain by hitting the ball to unusual places. He bowls leg-spin, but with a slightly unorthodox grip that make it difficult to read him out of the hand. Accordingly he should be the sort of bowler who can get out the tail quickly, which might be a very useful skill in the first game for Sri Lanka. He might not be a bad player to have in your fantasy team for the match against Zimbabwe.