Thursday 12 February 2009

Batting: Percentage failure and despair

There's an excellent statistical deconstruction of England's batting from 2007 onwards by S Rajesh over at Cricinfo

There's a stat in there called failure percentage, the number of times a batter fails to reach 20. Bell is top (or bottom) at 48.57. Pietersen's percentage is 41.18, which is good, presumably, given his record. 

Bowlers like to think it's a batter's game. This stat says it's not - you fail almost half the times you try. And they wonder why batsmen become weird and neurotic. 

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

The stats show a 50% chance of success everytime you walk into bat, which is fine. But when you succeed (the other 50%), how much you make it count actually decides your batting average, and your value to your side.

The problem with Bell is that the other 51.43% times when he gets past 20, he has fell for a score below 50, which is equally ordinary. However, KP has gone on to make scores of 50+.