Pappus' plane - cricket stats

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).

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.