the kumars at no. 57.40

Here's a quick round-up of statistical nuggetry on the retirement of two admirably nuggety left-handers, Kumar Sangakkara of Sri Lanka and Shivnarine Chanderpaul of the West Indies. Slightly different circumstances surrounding their departures: Sangakkara's planned in advance and allowing the tearful valedictory bat-wave on his departure from the crease for the last time, Chanderpaul's enforced by West Indies management (rather like Brian Lara before him) after a run of low scores, and denying him the chance to go out on his own terms, valedictory bat-wave and all.

By an odd coincidence Sangakkara, Lara and Chanderpaul occupy three adjacent spots (5th, 6th and 7th) on the overall Test run-scorers list, which means that they are also the 1st, 2nd and 3rd most prolific left-handed batsmen in Test history - Allan Border, Alastair Cook, Graeme Smith, Matthew Hayden, David Gower, Garry Sobers and Justin Langer make up the rest of the top ten. Since Langer is 30th overall on the list, you can see that exactly one-third of the top 30 batsmen are left-handed, which gives you an insight into their prevalence in comparison to the prevalence of left-handedness in the population at large (about 10%). There is a catch here, though, which is that not all players who bat left-handed are left-handed in the traditional sense, i.e. doing the "normal" stuff like writing with their left hand. Gower and Lara, for instance, were left-handed batsman and right-handed writers (and occasional bowlers); conversely, Tendulkar batted and bowled right-handed and wrote with his left hand.

Both retirements also necessitate some revision of my obscure hierarchy of batting averages: Sangakkara ends Jacques Kallis' 18-month tenure on the overall list by replacing him. It's worth re-iterating the point of these lists: for each person appearing on it, no-one who has come later has finished with a higher average.

Player	Year	Average
Kumar Sangakkara	2015	57.40
Garfield Sobers	1974	57.78
Ken Barrington	1968	58.67
Don Bradman	1948	99.94

As you can see, Sangakkara wasn't that far from removing Garry Sobers from the list - before his last two matches against India he was averaging 58.04, and only needed to score 133 runs in his last match (rather than the 50 he actually did score) to finish with an average in excess of Sobers'. The 325 runs he would have needed to score to displace Ken Barrington would have been a tall order, and the 9240 runs he would have needed to score to displace Don Bradman definitely would have been.. Nonetheless he collapses the Sri Lankan list to a single entry, just as Kallis and Sachin Tendulkar did for their respective countries on their retirements. I should add, just for completeness, that Sangakkara's old mucker Mahela Jayawardene would have been occupying the Sri Lankan list on his own since his retirement in 2014 if I'd been scrupulous about keeping things up-to-date.

Chanderpaul still talks up his chances of a return to Test cricket, but I think we're pretty safe in assuming that that won't happen, just as we are for Kevin Pietersen of England. I therefore think it's safe to include them on their respective countries' lists. Chanderpaul displaces his old team-mate Ramnaresh Sarwan for West Indies, and Pietersen displaces everyone post-Boycott for England. Michael Clarke's retirement at the end of the recent Ashes series slots him in at the end of the Australian list.

England

Player	Year	Average
Kevin Pietersen	2014	47.28
Geoff Boycott	1982	47.72
Ted Dexter	1968	47.89
Ken Barrington	1968	58.67
Herbert Sutcliffe	1935	60.73

Australia

Player	Year	Average
Michael Clarke	2015	49.10
Mike Hussey	2013	51.52
Ricky Ponting	2012	51.85
Greg Chappell	1984	53.86
Don Bradman	1948	99.94

South Africa

Player	Year	Average
Jacques Kallis	2013	55.37

India

Player	Year	Average
Sachin Tendulkar	2013	53.78

Pakistan

Player	Year	Average
Mohammad Yousuf	2010	52.29
Javed Miandad	1993	52.57

Sri Lanka

Player	Year	Average
Kumar Sangakkara	2015	57.40

New Zealand

Player	Year	Average
Stephen Fleming	2008	40.06
Mark Richardson	2004	44.77
Martin Crowe	1995	45.36

West Indies

Player	Year	Average
Shivnarine Chanderpaul	2014	51.37
Brian Lara	2006	52.88
Gary Sobers	1974	57.78
Everton Weekes	1958	58.61

Zimbabwe

Player	Year	Average
Andy Flower	2002	51.54

more stats - calm yourself

Nothing too surprising about the result in the recently-completed West Indies v Australia test series; 2-0 to the Australians. What was slightly more surprising was the relatively competitive nature of the matches, given the relative strengths of the teams. Hard to say whether this is due to the Australians not being quite as good as they once were, particularly in the bowling department after the departure of McGrath and Warne, or the West Indies improving. Probably a bit of both.

Nice to see another player responding to being bigged up on this blog by producing the goods on the pitch, though, in this case the mighty Shiv Chanderpaul, who, in the course of becoming by far the highest run-scorer on either side with 442 at an average of of 147.33, clocked up a run of 1115 minutes (18 hours and 35 minutes) of batting without being dismissed, during which time he faced 689 balls and scored 313 runs (107 not out, 77 not out, 79 not out and 50). He's clocked up over 1000 minutes between dismissals at least twice before: while scoring 101 not out against Bangladesh and then 128 not out, 97 not out and 45 against England in 2004, and while scoring 116 not out, 136 not out and 70 against England in 2007 (this is the sequence that prompted my previous post). I have no idea whether this is a record or not. If you find out, let me know.

Chanderpaul also became only the fourth West Indian to pass 8000 Test runs - consider that the previous three were Sobers, Richards and Lara and you get the idea of the sort of company he now finds himself in.

On a less Stattoesque note, the recent influx of players from beyond the usual West Indian strongholds of Jamaica and Barbados (Chanderpaul is from Guyana) has resulted in a fascinating array of entertaining names. Only one of the following list of players is made up - see if you can spot it:

• Dwayne Bravo
• Sulieman Benn
• Mahendra Nagamootoo
• Prepostera Dogidoodoo
• Sewnarine Chattergoon
• Brenton Parchment
• Amit Jaggernauth
• Rangy Nanan
• Dinanath Ramnarine

two for the price of one: doom AND gloom

After the brief euphoria of West Indies' narrow series victory over England in the Caribbean over the winter they seem to have come back down to earth with a bang now that they're in England - to be fair this seems to have been a hastily-arranged series, played far too early in the year at grounds unsuited to Test cricket in May (including the most northerly Test venue in the world - smart thinking), and the West Indies players don't exactly seem to be brimming with enthusiasm about the whole thing.

As I speak the two senior batsmen, Ramnaresh Sarwan and the admirable Shivnarine Chanderpaul, are trying to extract the West Indies from the dicey situation they find themselves in. My suspicion is that further Arctic weather may well enable them to get away with a draw, especially as we've lost a whole day already.

Anyway, the current debacle has resulted in a whole rash of opinions on why West Indies cricket has declined. I don't have much to add to what's been written on the subject already; I'll just add another couple of personal observations.

Firstly, you can keep your Australian "Invincibles" of 1948, and your record-breaking Waugh/Ponting Aussie team of the late 1990s and early 2000s, the best Test team I've ever seen is the 1984 West Indies team that destroyed a pretty decent England side (Botham, Lamb, Gower, Willis and all) 5-0. Just look at the names: Gordon Greenidge, Desmond Haynes, Viv Richards, Clive Lloyd, Malcolm Marshall, Michael Holding, Joel Garner. That set the West Indies up for a period of dominance that lasted until the Australians beat them at home in 1995.

The point is that most of the current West Indies side will have grown up wanting to emulate the greats of this long period of dominance - all the players I've already mentioned plus the likes of Richardson, Lara, Walsh and Ambrose. If that's the case and they're still in the shambolic state that they are, what of the next generation, who will have grown up watching the slightly less magnificent talents of Clayton Lambert, Reon King and Tino Best getting beaten by all-comers? You can hardly blame them if the lure of basketball or football seems more tempting.

As if to confirm this gloomy thinking both Chanderpaul and Sarwan are now out and West Indies really are in the poo.

I'm leaving the Ashes previewing for another day. Watch this space.

I don't mean to be mean, but look at your mean

I recall a question being asked on some cricket forum or other, possibly this one: who is the worst best player in Test history? In other words, who has (considering batsmen as an example) scored the most runs at the lowest average? That turns out to be an almost impossible question to answer, but one answer given was Mike Atherton, who has the lowest batting average of any player with over 6000 runs. This seems a bit harsh on Atherton, a fine and combative batsman and a key player in the not-exactly-world-beating England teams of the 1990s, but it set me off on a train of thought which resulted in the tables below.

As with the tables here, here and here, a bit of preparatory mental calibration is probably required: for each of the entries in the batting table, no-one has made more runs at a lower average.

Player	Tests	Runs	Average
RT Ponting (AUS)	168	13378	51.85
AN Cook (ENG)	161	12472	45.35
GA Gooch (ENG)	118	8900	42.58
AJ Stewart (ENG)	133	8463	39.54
MA Atherton (ENG)	115	7728	37.69
N Hussain (ENG)	96	5764	37.18
CL Hooper (WI)	102	5762	36.46
MV Boucher (ICC/SA)	147	5515	30.30
DL Vettori (ICC/NZ)	113	4531	30.00
IA Healy (AUS)	119	4356	27.39
RW Marsh (AUS)	96	3633	26.51
SCJ Broad (ENG)	138	3211	18.66
SK Warne (AUS)	145	3154	17.32
HMRKB Herath (SL)	93	1699	14.64
CEL Ambrose (WI)	98	1439	12.40
M Muralitharan (ICC/SL)	133	1261	11.67
JM Anderson (ENG)	151	1185	9.63
CA Walsh (WI)	132	936	7.54
GD McGrath (AUS)	124	641	7.36
LR Gibbs (WI)	79	488	6.97
FH Edwards (WI)	55	394	6.56
DE Malcolm (ENG)	40	236	6.05
PT Collins (WI)	32	235	5.87
MS Panesar (ENG)	50	220	4.88
ST Gabriel (WI)	45	200	4.76
BS Chandrasekhar (INDIA)	58	167	4.07
N Pradeep (SL)	28	132	4.00
CS Martin (NZ)	71	123	2.36

This seems a bit harsh on Ricky Ponting in particular, but he just happens to be second on the overall list of highest Test run-scorers and to have an average that's a couple of runs per innings lower than that of the top man on the list, Sachin Tendulkar.

It is interesting to see that there are a few distinct zones on the list: once you get past Ponting and Cook you're into the English Batsmen Of The 1990s Zone featuring Gooch, Stewart, Atherton and Hussain and providing an insight into why England didn't win a lot during that era: not enough runs. Then there is a brief Wicketkeeper-Batsmen Zone featuring Boucher, Healy and Marsh, and then a Long-Serving And Distinguished Bowler Zone in reverse order of batting competence (Broad through Gibbs, say), and then a Proper Incompetents Zone at the end. Obviously there are probably people with a Test average of zero from one or two innings, but the rule of thumb I applied was to go down as far as Chris Martin, fine bowler but famously one of the worst batsmen in history, and then stop. As it happens he has the lowest average of anyone with over 100 Test runs, so that provided a nice sensible cut-off point anyway. Martin and Bhagwat Chandrasekhar are the most distinguished members of the select club of players who have more Test wickets than runs.

Here's the bowling table - this time the qualifying criterion is: no-one has taken more wickets at a higher average.

Player	Tests	Wickets	Average
SK Warne (AUS)	145	708	25.41
A Kumble (INDIA)	132	619	29.65
Harbhajan Singh (INDIA)	103	417	32.46
DL Vettori (ICC/NZ)	113	362	34.36
Danish Kaneria (PAK)	61	261	34.79
MM Ali (ENG)	60	181	36.59
FH Edwards (WI)	55	165	37.87
RJ Shastri (INDIA)	80	151	40.96
CL Hooper (WI)	102	114	49.42
Mohammad Sami (PAK)	36	85	52.74
SR Tendulkar (INDIA)	200	46	54.17
MN Samuels (WI)	71	41	59.63
Rubel Hossain (BDESH)	27	36	76.77
IDK Salisbury (ENG)	15	20	76.95
Mohammad Sharif (BDESH)	10	14	79.00
KP Pietersen (ENG)	104	10	88.60
S Chanderpaul (WI)	164	9	98.11
EAR de Silva (SL)	10	8	129.00
MA Atherton (ENG)	115	2	151.00
CA Davis (WI)	15	2	165.00
NM Kulkarni (INDIA)	3	2	166.00
S Matsikenyeri (ZIM)	8	2	172.50
CS Nayudu (INDIA)	11	2	179.50
KLT Arthurton (WI)	33	1	183.00
RS Bopara (ENG)	13	1	290.00
Naeem Islam (BDESH)	8	1	303.00

Once again there are some distinct zones here, the Distinguished Spinners Zone at the top (Warne through Kaneria), the All-Rounders Zone (Ali, Shastri, Hooper), and then a mixture of specialist bowlers with short and unproductive careers and specialist batsmen who occasionally turned their arm over as light relief, say at the tail-end of a drawn game. Note that you don't see the long list of long-serving batsmen (Pietersen, Chanderpaul and Atherton apart) to match the bowlers in the other list; this is just a consequence of the way the game works. Even confirmed number 11 batsmen like McGrath and Walsh have to bat reasonably frequently; no-one has to bowl. For example, Alastair Cook's long and distinguished 161-Test career included a paltry three overs as a bowler, although to be fair he did take one wicket during those overs, which incidentally gives him an overall strike rate (i.e. balls per wicket) of 18.00, far superior to even the likes of Dale Steyn.

But I digress. Players who appear on both lists are Mike Atherton, Carl Hooper, Daniel Vettori, Shane Warne and Fidel Edwards. Note also that the top men from the overall batting and bowling lists (Tendulkar and Muralitharan) each appear on the opposite list here.

criclebrity lookylikey of the day

Here's one in commemoration of the Ashes series which kicked off yesterday: England opener Rory Burns and his (I think) relatively newly-acquired goatee beard, and actor Ethan Hawke.

Burns is 82 not out at tea on day 2 of the first Test as I write this, which is nice. Will he be part of the answer to England's opening batsman problems which have really been going on since Andrew Strauss retired in 2012? Well, that'd be nice, although he does have a fairly horrible twitchy shuffly technique - then again that never stopped Shiv Chanderpaul or current Aussie wonderboy (and, let's not forget, proven cheat and scoundrel) Steve Smith.

the truth is out there

Needless to say I had to go and find out the answer to the question I posed in my last post, and it is this: Chanderpaul is unique in having gone 1000+ minutes between dismissals in Test cricket more than once. He has actually done it no less than four times; the one I missed was in 2002, when his successive scores of 67 not out, 101 not out, 136 not out and 58 occupied a monstrous 1513 minutes, i.e. just over 25 hours, which is a record. Bill Frindall's TMS page has the lowdown, needless to say; more info is available here.

The most runs between dismissals, since you ask, is 497 by Sachin Tendulkar in 2004.

up the Vaas!

A couple of unsung cricketing heroes for you, both of whom who have achieved noteworthy deeds in the cricketing arena in the last couple of weeks which, for one reason or another, might have escaped your notice.

Firstly (and my excuse for the title of this post) Chaminda Vaas, the admirable Sri Lankan left-arm seam bowler. Not only is he second on a remarkably lopsided all-time list of Sri Lankan Test wicket-takers (one approaching 700, one over 300, nobody else over 100), but by scoring 100 not out in the recent Test against Bangladesh in Colombo he managed finally to remove himself from one of Test batting's more esoteric league tables: most runs in a career without ever making a century, a list he formerly occupied second position in behind Shane Warne.

Secondly, Shivnarine Chanderpaul, the gritty West Indian left-hander. After Brian Lara's retirement he's now the senior batsman in the side (all the more so after Ramnaresh Sarwan crocked himself). No-one's going to be making any claims for him being as much of a pleasure to watch as Lara was, far from it in fact, but scores of 74, 50, 116 not out, 136 not out and 70 in the recent series against England, especially while his team-mates were dropping like flies around him, can't be argued with. During the course of this prolific run he became just the seventh West Indian to pass 7000 Test runs, and at a higher average than his illustrious predecessors Gordon Greenidge and Desmond Haynes, both of whom generally had the luxury of playing in winning teams. For a batsman whose reputation is of being a nudger and an accumulator of runs rather than a destroyer of bowling in the Viv Richards or Brian Lara mould, it's a bizarre anomaly that he is also the owner of the fourth fastest Test hundred ever made, and against the mighty Australians as well. It's always the quiet ones.

cricizen kane

I was prompted by the recent resumption of near-normal Test cricket in New Zealand, and in particular by the record-breaking feats of Kane Williamson, to revisit a couple of previous posts featuring deep cricket stat-nerdery and do my best to out-nerd them in some way.

Williamson's innings of 238 against Pakistan in Christchurch was of particular interest to me as it was the first innings of 238 in the 145-year history of Test cricket. You may recall my post from a few years back (January 2013 to be precise) about the esoteric study of yet-to-be-made individual innings scores in Test cricket, and the subsequent flurry of pant-moistening excitement in late 2015 when several entries on that list were knocked off in quick succession. 

Since the compilation of my original list by painstaking manual methods in 2013 I have developed some fiendishly clever automated methods for extracting statistics related to this subject, and I am both proud and, yes, all right, slightly aroused to present some of the results here.

The first thing to say is that there was an error in my original list: the inclusion of 114 as a score which was once the lowest un-made score in a Test match was an error, and the first occurrence of that score was not by Herbert Sutcliffe in 1929 but by Jack Hearne in 1912 (Sutcliffe's innings was actually the fourth 114 in Test history). So the revised progression looks like this:

Score	Player	Date	Match	Span (time)	Span (Tests)
100	JT Tyldesley	3rd July 1905	ENG v AUS	28y 110d	84
110	WH Ponsford	19th December 1924	AUS v ENG	19y 169d	73
125	PGV van der Bijl	3rd March 1939	RSA v ENG	9y 261d	90
139	ED Weekes	11th April 1955	WI v AUS	16y 39d	133
171	IR Redpath	11th December 1970	AUS v ENG	15y 244d	271
186	Zaheer Abbas	23rd December 1982	PAK v IND	12y 12d	267
199	Mudassar Nazar	24th October 1984	PAK v IND	1y 306d	54
218	SV Manjrekar	1st December 1989	IND v PAK	5y 38d	134
224	VG Kambli	19th February 1993	IND v ENG	2y 80d	84
228	HH Gibbs	2nd January 2003	RSA v PAK	9y 318d	423

The five lowest "missing" scores in Tests are now 229, 252, 265, 272 and 273. The last ten innings which plugged a gap on the list were as follows:

Score	Player	Team	Opposition	Date	Venue
238	KS Williamson	New Zealand	Pakistan	03/01/2021	Christchurch
335*	DA Warner	Australia	Pakistan	29/11/2019	Adelaide
264*	TWM Latham	New Zealand	Sri Lanka	15/12/2018	Wellington
303*	KK Nair	India	England	16/12/2016	Chennai
269*	AC Voges	Australia	West Indies	10/12/2015	Hobart
290	LRPL Taylor	New Zealand	Australia	13/11/2015	Perth
245	Shoaib Malik	Pakistan	England	13/10/2015	Abu Dhabi
263	AN Cook	England	Pakistan	13/10/2015	Abu Dhabi
294	AN Cook	England	India	10/08/2011	Birmingham
293	V Sehwag	India	Sri Lanka	02/12/2009	Mumbai (BS)

At the other end of the scale, multiple occurrences of the same score for the same batsman: the highest individual score to be made more than once by the same batsman is 203, by Shoaib Mohammad and Shivnarine Chanderpaul (twice each), the highest individual score to be made three times by the same player is 158 by Kevin Pietersen, the highest individual score to be made four times by the same player is 105 by Alastair Cook and the only batsman to make the same individual score on five separate occasions is Virat Kohli with 103.

The only two instances in Test history of a batsman making two identical scores in excess of 100 in the same Test match were a pair of 105s by Sri Lanka's Duleep Mendis in 1982 and a pair of 101s by Pakistan's Misbah-ul-Haq in 2014, the second of those 101s being at the time the joint-fastest century in Test history in just 56 balls (New Zealand's Brendon McCullum has since taken sole possession of the record).