Thursday, December 27, 2007
Rising at the top: bowlers
And now onto bowlers who do better in Tests than in other first-class matches. Unlike batsmen, this phenomenon is pretty rare for bowlers with long international careers, and even then the difference in average is pretty small. With a qualification of 50 Test wickets, you get the following table ("others" is the number of other first-class matches).
The rows following the "---" continue the table with a qualification of 100 Test wickets.
George Lohmann's difference of 3 runs out of 14 looks quite large, but his Test average was helped by his 35 wickets at 5,8 against a weak South African side in 1895/6. Against Australia his average was 13,01, not much below his first-class average.
Of the 310 bowlers with 50 or more Test wickets, only 36 have a better average in Tests than in first-class cricket. Compare this with batsmen: of the 308 batsmen with more than 1500 Test runs, 82 have a better average in Tests.
Presumably this asymmetry arises in part because a batsman who isn't concentrating so hard (as he may do in a domestic or tour game) is liable to get out early, but a bowler can keep putting the ball on the spot and take wickets. The wet weather early in the English county season (mentioned by damien at CFF) is probably also a factor.
name tests wkts avg others wkts avg diff
Clark,Stuart 11 54 20,24 73 258 28,70 8,46
Gilmour,Gary 15 54 26,04 60 179 33,18 7,14
Jones,Simon 18 59 28,24 61 159 34,74 6,50
Miller,Colin 18 69 26,16 108 377 31,86 5,70
Ferris,JJ 9 61 12,70 189 751 17,94 5,24
Bond,Shane 17 79 22,39 37 113 26,93 4,54
Ironmonger,Bert 14 74 17,97 82 390 22,18 4,21
Lohmann,George 18 112 10,76 275 1729 13,93 3,17
Ntini,Makhaya 79 319 27,68 65 191 30,72 3,05
---
Reid,Bruce 27 113 24,64 69 237 27,59 2,95
MacGill,Stuart 41 194 29,03 137 549 31,25 2,22
Croft,Colin 27 125 23,30 94 303 25,13 1,82
Hughes,Merv 53 212 28,38 112 381 29,95 1,57
Warne,Shane 144 702 25,53 156 611 26,93 1,40
Streak,Heath 65 216 28,14 110 283 29,23 1,09
Akhtar,Shoaib 46 178 25,70 81 272 26,76 1,06
Barnes,SF 27 189 16,43 106 530 17,33 0,89
The rows following the "---" continue the table with a qualification of 100 Test wickets.
George Lohmann's difference of 3 runs out of 14 looks quite large, but his Test average was helped by his 35 wickets at 5,8 against a weak South African side in 1895/6. Against Australia his average was 13,01, not much below his first-class average.
Of the 310 bowlers with 50 or more Test wickets, only 36 have a better average in Tests than in first-class cricket. Compare this with batsmen: of the 308 batsmen with more than 1500 Test runs, 82 have a better average in Tests.
Presumably this asymmetry arises in part because a batsman who isn't concentrating so hard (as he may do in a domestic or tour game) is liable to get out early, but a bowler can keep putting the ball on the spot and take wickets. The wet weather early in the English county season (mentioned by damien at CFF) is probably also a factor.
Comments:
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By that measure David, surely some of those early "Tests" should not really be counted as such either...
I'll happily remove those early South African Tests if the relevant authority decides to. But at least they didn't composite teams. I'm still hopeful that the ICC will revoke the Test status of the recent Supertest, in much the same way as was done with the England v World Tests-but-later-not-Tests from the 1970's.
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