Quick look at Adelaide ODI

A couple of thoughts about the Adelaide match.

1. Adelaide tends to be a good ground for players that are strong playing square of the wicket. Batsmen like Pietersen and Haddin might be good to look at for a top run scorer bet. Likewise Trott is in good form, and hit 78 in the test match here, so at $5 he's not a bad option.

2. Adalaide has been a stronghold for Australia, winning almost 3/4 of the matches played here. They have a RPO of about 0.4 more than their opponents at this ground.

3. It's normally a bat first pitch. (Australia have only lost 4 times out of the 18 times they have batted first in Adelaide. This is a good sign for England, who have won the toss and batted.

4. 272 is the median score for a team batting first and winning at Adelaide over the last 10 years. Les Burdett tends to produce fairly uniform pitches, so this is likely to be about what England will need to win.

Things to watch for in Queenstown

Here's some things to look for in Queenstown today:

In all international matches (mens, womens, under 19's) there have only been 2 occasions where the side batting first have won: Australia under 19's vs Ireland under 19's, and Australia under 19's vs USA under 19's.) As the toss was largely irrelevant due to the mismatch between these sides, it's clearly a bowl first ground. However there is talk that the pitch is a lot drier than usual, so this might level out.

Traditionally medium pacers have done well here. Jacob Oram has enjoyed the ground, bowling 40 overs for 127 runs and 5 wickets. That's only just over 3 an over. Vettori has also had success here, although his figures here are similar to his figures in the rest of New Zealand. Look for Sohail Tanvir and Abdul Razzaq to be a handful on this pitch. Likewise it might suit Styris, if Vettori gives him the ball.

McCullum averages over 100 at a strike rate of 144 at Queenstown, and being an Otago player is quite familiar with the ground. He might be a player to watch with the bat, although normally it tends to favour openers, so in current form, Jesse Ryder might be a expected to do well. Left handers have also generally done better than right handers at Queenstown.

A different kind of hundred partnership

In a test match if a pair of batsmen put on a hundred partnership, it generally increases the teams score by that number of runs. This seems fairly obvious. The exception comes when a team is trying to put together some quick runs before declaring. In this case the team are often going to declare at a certain score regardless of how many wickets have fallen. In this case if a team is 220/3 or 220/7 they will still get 220. A 2nd wicket partnership of 100 if the team declares at 220 has not necessarily added 100 because the team may have got to that total even if that partnership had been 0. Likewise if a team is chasing a winning total the same thing applies.

A similar situation happens in one day cricket. A team has two resources that they have to convert into runs, wickets and balls. If a team that has 1 over left and 7 wickets in hand, the wickets are completely irrelevant. But at the start of an innings the wickets are very important. A slow 100 run partnership at the end of a match can actually cost a team runs that they should have got. There are famous stories of this happening, including one where Ian Botham deliberately ran out Geoffrey Boycott because he felt Boycott was scoring too slowly.

Fortunately Frank Duckworth and Tony Lewis developed a system of describing the number of resources left to a team at various combinations of overs and wickets. While their system was designed solely to help find fair targets/decisions in rain affected matches, it is a useful tool for analysing progress throughout games.

I used their basic version to look at all the partnerships over 70 in ODI's this year. The key things I was looking at were the predicted score then they came to the wicket, and then the predicted score when their partnership ended. I already used this technique once in an earlier post Duckworth Lewis as a prediction tool

The problem came with opening partnerships, as there was no data to use for the inital prediction. As the Duckworth-Lewis system was based on the idea of 250 being the expected score for a team, I used this as my starting point.

Using this system I generated this list of the top partnerships:

Batsmen Names	Score	Start	End	DL Difference
MJ Guptill, JD Ryder	84	-	84/1, 10.0 Overs	282
SM Davies, AJ Strauss	90	-	90/1, 12.1 Overs	245
BJ Haddin, SR Watson	110	-	110/1, 19.4 Overs	147
HM Amla, MN van Wyk	97	16/1, 2.3 Overs	113/2, 22.2 Overs	133
SE Marsh, CL White	100	33/4, 12.3 Overs	133/5, 32.6 Overs	128

Haddin and Watson scored 26 more than Ryder and Guptill, but because they took 9.4 overs more to do it, their partnership is not rated as highly. The biggest problem with this way of measuring partnerships is that it penalises a pair if someone else did particularly well. For example, when Haddin got out, Michael Clarke came in an added 103 with Watson, in 19.1 overs at 5.37 which is not a bad effort in the middle overs. However the DL predicted score when Clarke arrived was 397, and it reduced to 322 by the time he departed, giving them a score of -75. However the team were chasing 295, so effectively they are being penalised for the good start, and for them pacing the innings appropriately.

I'll do an update of this table at the end of the group stage of the World Cup and it will be interesting to see who comes out on top.

Fortresses

I just watched a very brief ODI between New Zealand. It was the third of 3 ODI matches that were played over 2 days in the Southern Hemisphere.

First Australia eventually beat England by a quite large margin, then the rain robbed South Africa of another opportunity to choke against India, and then finally New Zealand snapped their 11 match losing streak in ODI's with a performance that defied most superlatives.

But despite these games going slightly against recent form, all three of them continue a long-term trend. These three matches were all played at fortresses.

By a fortress I mean a ground where the home team has won more than twice as many as they lose, and have a RPO scored of more that 0.5 more than RPO conceded. The lucky coincidence is that these three games were played at the grounds that are at the top of the list for RPO difference.

Here is the list of the 6 fortresses: (qualification 15 matches)

Team	Stadium	W/L	RPO for	RPO against	RPO difference
New Zealand	Caketin, Wellington	2.40	5.16	4.37	0.79
South Africa	Newlands, Cape Town	6.25	4.96	4.18	0.78
Australia	Bellerive Oval, Hobart	3.66	5.05	4.33	0.72
West Indies	Arnos Vale, St Vincent	5.66	4.41	3.82	0.59
South Africa	Springbok Park, Bloemfontein	2.00	5.10	4.54	0.56
South Africa	Buffalo Park, East London	2.75	4.86	4.32	0.54

There is one interesting result in there, Arnos Vale in St Vincent (pictured above). The results there are certainly helped by 3 matches against Zimbabwe and 2 matches against Bangladesh, but even removing these matches, they still have a W/L ratio of 4 and a RPO difference of 0.4. The other extraordinary thing about this is that all but one of the matches are after 1992. (That's after the retirement of Marshall, Garner, Holding, Richards etc.)

The next 3 games are at Centurion, Adelaide and Queenstown, all of which only just miss out on this list, so it wouldn't be a surprise to see a repeat of the last two days results.

There is only one ground in the world that is a fortress for the away teams, Bangabandhu Stadium in Dhaka. Bangladesh have won only 3 of 32 matches there, and have conceded 1.2 runs per over more than they have scored. However, with the improvement in the Bangladesh team, and the extra teams that have been given ODI status, look for that statistic to change.

From the mouth of...

I noticed something interesting in the test matches. Often people complain about the incessant talk by the wicket-keepers being picked up by the stump microphones, but in this match it was quite revealing.

Here's what they were saying:

Reece Young: "Just one mistake boys"
Adnan Akmal: "Come on, bowl that magic ball"

The difference in approach to bowling is remarkable. The Pakistani approach was to try and bowl a delivery that would get the batsman out. The New Zealand approach was to bowl a ball that would make a batsman make a mistake.

The New Zealand approach is fine if the batsmen are attacking, but it is next to useless if they are just occupying the crease. Perhaps that's why New Zealand has the third worst balls per wicket of any team over the last 3 years (only slightly behind Bangladesh and the West Indies).

It also explains why New Zealand bowl so poorly in the 3rd and 4th innings. While they average 71.6 deliveries per wicket in a teams first innings, they average 85.4 deliveries per wicket in the second innings.

To look at those numbers, New Zealand should expect it to take 120 overs to bowl out a team in their first innings. This is 4 sessions, which is about what you would expect. However, it would take 143 overs to bowl them out in the second innings. This is almost 5 sessions. If they take 4 sessions in the first innings, and 5 in the second, it only leaves 6 sessions for New Zealand to score their runs.

Given New Zealand's economy rates of 3.04 in the first innings, and 2.96 in the second innings they will require roughly 780 runs to win these games. With only 182 overs to bat, NZ need to score at 4.29 per over to get enough runs, and have enough time to bowl a team out. Given that this is unrealistic, they either need to re-think their bowling approach in the final innings, or be prepared to either lose or draw most tests.

Time to pick a NZ World Cup team.

At tea today, the NZ squad of 15 is named. However it's much more fun to name our own teams before they name theirs.

The team has to be made up of players from the 30 man squad:

Brent Arnel, Hamish Bennett, Doug Bracewell, Dean Brownlie, Ian Butler, Grant Elliott, Daniel Flynn, Martin Guptill, Jamie How, James Franklin, Kyle Mills, Adam Milne, Brendon McCullum, Nathan McCullum, Peter McGlashan, Andy McKay, Rob Nicol, Jacob Oram, Jeetan Patel, Jesse Ryder, Tim Southee, Shanan Stewart, Scott Styris, Ross Taylor, Daryl Tuffey, Daniel Vettori, BJ Watling, Kane Williamson, Luke Woodcock, Reece Young.

Unfortunately this means no Redmond, Vincent, Bates, Aldridge or Mason.

Here's my team:

B McCullum
Ryder
Taylor
Guptil
Styris
Vettori
N McCullum
McGlashan
Mills
Southee
Butler
Tuffey
Franklin
Oram
Flynn

What's your 15?

The First Innings Spinner

In the modern game (the era of covered pitches) the role of a spinner has often been to come in when the pitch is starting to break up and bowl out a team. The theory is that a good spin bowler is almost impossible to play on the final day and a half of a test match.

There is one glaring exception to this rule: Daniel Vettori.

With his subtle changes of pace, and the fact that he relies more on bounce than spin, he has often found the pitches at the end of the game less to his liking than the ones at the start.

Less than 10% of his wickets have come in the fourth innings. He only once took a 5 wicket bag in the 4th innings, and that was in his first season, when he was a very different bowler than he is now.

To demonstrate the difference I've compiled a list of bowlers based on their performances first in a teams first innings, then in a teams second innings:

Bowling in a teams 1st innings by a modern spinner. (qual. 90 wickets)

Name	Wickets	Average	Strike-rate	5 Wicket bags
SCG MacGill	112	29.08	53.8	6
M Muralitharan	458	23.94	57.9	39
BS Chandrasekhar	125	29.41	61.1	11
SK Warne	349	28.04	61.3	18
Saqlain Mushtaq	135	30.22	65.4	11
Abdul Qadir	151	32.19	70.1	10
Danish Kaneria	149	37.26	71.1	8
A Kumble	339	32.16	72.5	18
DL Vettori	215	32.61	74.4	13
Harbhajan Singh	219	37.28	75.5	14
Mushtaq Ahmed	104	40.16	79.2	4
Iqbal Qasim	93	31.74	84.7	4
BS Bedi	124	34.43	89.9	6
RJ Shastri	106	44.28	111	2

This puts him in some good company, at a similar level to Anil Kumble, Abdul Qadir and Danish Kaneria, all very good bowlers.

However the next table is for a teams second innings. It is not so flattering.

Bowling in a teams 2nd innings by a modern spinner. (qual. 50 wickets)

Name	Wickets	Average	Strike-rate	5 Wicket bags
M Muralitharan	342	21.08	51.2	28
Mushtaq Ahmed	81	23.74	52.9	6
SK Warne	359	22.85	53.7	19
SCG MacGill	96	28.96	54.1	6
Harbhajan Singh	174	25.01	57	11
A Kumble	280	26.6	58	17
PR Adams	67	30.64	58	1
JG Bracewell	55	25.21	60	4
GP Swann	60	28.46	60.5	5
Danish Kaneria	112	31.5	63.3	7
N Boje	62	30.12	64.6	2
BS Bedi	72	21.79	64.8	4
BS Chandrasekhar	55	28.72	64.8	3
MS Panesar	64	29.31	65.3	6
Iqbal Qasim	78	23.78	65.8	4
AA Mallett	55	29.21	71.6	1
Saqlain Mushtaq	73	29.12	71.7	2
AF Giles	61	36.09	76.5	2
Abdul Qadir	85	33.88	76.8	5
PL Harris	52	30.69	78.1	1
JE Emburey	63	28.61	82.4	4
DL Vettori	129	36.08	82.5	6
PCR Tufnell	58	29.18	82.8	3
ST Jayasuriya	51	35.13	88.7	0

To make matters worse, if we compare the averages, then he moves a step further down the table, with only Ashley Giles below him (and then only by 0.01 of a run).

The contrast between the two tables is quite incredible. He is one of only two spin bowlers to have taken 100 wickets in the modern era, and average worse in the second innings than the first. The other bowler is Graeme Swann, and his averages are only 0.67 apart. Vettori's difference is 3.47.

If he is to bowl out Pakistan in the fourth innings in the current test at Wellington, it will be a performance against the form book.