Let’s start, as all bad writing should, with a cliché: cricket is an individual sport, dressed up as a team game. Each match consists of hundreds or thousands of contests between a batsman and a bowler. That unusual gameplay is one of the main reasons why Test cricket in particular hits the parts that other sports can’t reach. But never mind all that soulful stuff about the meaning of life; we’re here to talk about the joys of modest statgasm.
Ever since he produced a statistical preview of the 2002-03 Ashes for Wisden Cricket Monthly, an impossibly glamorous assignment for a novice anorak hack, The Spin has been fascinated by head-to-head averages, especially in Test cricket. Mano a mano and all that.
Related: How I fell in love with cricket statistics
Our research found that Ricky Ponting, Australia’s best player at the time, had taken 169 runs off 176 balls against Andrew Caddick without being dismissed, but against Darren Gough, England’s other senior bowler, he was ahead by eight switched off. to-head average of 16. Before we could send an urgent memo to England captain Nasser Hussain, Gough withdrew from the tour with an injury.
Fortunately for people with some neurology, this kind of data never gets old. The Spin recently started writing a monthly article for Wisden Cricket Monthly, using CricViz’s addictive database to look at history through a different lens.
Let’s start with a few nuggets. No. 11’s Alan Mullally has the highest boundary percentage of any Test batsman against Wasim Akram; Viv Richards scored at a strike rate of five runs per 100 balls against Geoffrey Boycott. Both statistics are true, but the sample size makes them essentially irrelevant. Like all of life’s euphoric pleasures, this historical data should be consumed responsibly. Failing to do so could devolve the cricket world into a dystopian mess, where clickbait statistics are treated as pearls of wisdom and Anil Kumble is celebrated not for his 700 Test wickets, but because he averages 45 with the bat against Mohammed Shami.
For the first WCM piece, we looked at which players had the best Test record against the great West Indian speedsters of the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. To our surprise, at the top of the list was a pioneer with limited overcapacity who was dropped from the Test team for the last time for a series against West Indies in 1992.
The late Dean Jones averaged 42.57 against the West Indies’ best of the best; the only other players with an average over 40 were Graham Gooch and Alec Stewart. Jones’ overall record against the West Indies was modest, with only two scores over 50 in 19 innings and an average of 37. That’s because he kept getting run out or bowled out, with Viv Richards as his unlikely nemesis.
Tracing the contours of battles over an entire career is a particular favourite, the cricketing tragedy equivalent of Sherlock v Moriarty or Raylan v Boyd. The battle for supremacy between Australia and the West Indies in the 1990s is symbolized by the battle between Curtly Ambrose and Steve Waugh. In their first three series, when the West Indies were the best team in the world, Waugh averaged 11 against Ambrose. In his last three, including the changing of the guard in 1994-95, he averaged 84. The overall head-to-head record (11 wickets at 24.54) suggests an emphatic win for Ambrose; in reality, it doesn’t begin to tell the story.
On their own, the numbers can look bare, boring and slightly scary. It’s the context and the stories – as Waugh asks Ambrose about the effect he watched in Trinidad in 1995, almost provoking a right-handed man – that bring them to life. If you’re blessed and cursed with a brain that remembers everything, a search result can instantly trigger a dozen memories and interpretations.
And a lot of complacency. Nothing is more rewarding than finding a nugget that confirms an opinion or interpretation that runs counter to received wisdom, a joy that isn’t even marred when your enthusiastic stats on WhatsApp are met with tumbleweed across the board. It’s easy to blame this on the unsatisfactory norms and mores of digital communications, rather than recognizing the possibility that the statistic might not be that interesting to someone else. It’s hard for us to accept that a 17-year-old Sachin Tendulkar’s record against Eddie Hemmings – 29 runs, 147 balls, 1 wicket, run-rate 1.18 per over – doesn’t deserve several emojis.
Another Tendulkar statistic is a little more profound. The first person to dismiss him five times in Tests wasn’t Ambrose, Shane Warne or any of the other greats of the 1990s. It was Hansie Cronje, South Africa’s occasional medium pacer. Tendulkar could not work out his dibbly-dobbly bowling and was often paralyzed into strokelessness. Over a period of seven years, he made 56 runs at 11.20 at Cronje in Test matches, at a run-rate of 1.69 per over. A scan of Tendulkar’s autobiography confirms that there are occasional truths, blessed truths and statistics. “I never felt comfortable against Hansie Cronje, who took me out a number of times with his mediocre pace,” he said. “Even when I had control over people like Allan Donald, Hansie somehow got the upper hand and I came to him in the most unexpected ways.”
We realize this isn’t for everyone, although we probably should have made that point earlier, before hundreds of people closed their browsers in a combination of confusion, disgust, and pity. We also know that in the grand scheme of the data revolution, it’s pretty simple. The level of sophistication goes well beyond The Spin’s quadragerarian noggin, but the ball-by-ball stuff feels both accessible and eternally valuable.
During last summer’s Ashes our hearts sank a little when Stuart Broad bowled to Mitch Marsh as we knew Marsh was averaging almost 200 against him. Conversely, we were relaxed when Zak Crawley faced Pat Cummins as we suspected he played better against him than any English batsman. A look at the various match-ups confirmed this (although Cummins dragged Crawley’s head-to-head average down from 98 to 54 by dismissing him twice in the final Test at the Oval).
When England visit New Zealand next year, they might want to look at Matthew Potts’ burgeoning record against Kane Williamson in Test cricket: 32 balls, 3 runs, 3 wickets. It’s a small sample size, so it could be a fluke. Plus, figuring out the relevance of each statistic is part of the fun. And – okay, if you insist – it’s often a gateway to the soulful, meaning-of-life stuff: the psychology and subtlety of the individual battles that make Test cricket the greatest sporting format of them all.
If there is any historical data that you would like us to investigate, please contact us. And you can subscribe to a month of Wisden Cricket Monthly for just £1.99. You will then switch to the normal annual subscription price of € 23.99.
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