Big-match players, and the day-night debate
Perhaps numbers never do reveal the full story, but they tell a large part of it
After thrashing India in the VB Series finals, among the first points Ricky Ponting made was to highlight the tendency of his players to lift their games a couple of notches for the big matches. "When the big games come around, the character of this side really stands up," he said. It may have been a deliberate attempt to rub salt into fresh Indian wounds, but it was also an accurate statement of the contrasting styles in which Australia and India have handled the crunch games.
Indians | ODIs | Runs | Ave | Career Ave | Diff |
Tendulkar | 14 | 360 | 32.72 | 44.86 | -12.14 |
Ganguly | 18 | 467 | 33.35 | 42.33 | -8.98 |
Sehwag | 11 | 233 | 25.88 | 34.48 | -8.6 |
Dravid | 16 | 450 | 34.61 | 38.9 | -4.29 |
Australians | |||||
Gilchrist | 16 | 567 | 40.5 | 36.3 | 4.2 |
Ponting | 16 | 646 | 53.83 | 41.8 | 12.03 |
Martyn | 14 | 374 | 62.33 | 41.47 | 20.86 |
Hayden | 7 | 366 | 73.2 | 42.27 | 30.93 |
With hundreds against every team except Bangladesh, and runs scored in all conditions, it's difficult to pick holes in the career of Sachin Tendulkar the Test batsman. However, his one-day international record isn't quite as impeccable (though it's still highly acceptable by most standards): a high percentage of his runs, and his centuries, have come in the subcontinent, and while expectations from him sometimes reach ridiculous proportions, the truth is he hasn't quite saved his best for the most testing situations.
Matches | Runs | Ave | 100s | ODIs/ 100 | |
In subcontinent | 195 | 8122 | 47.77 | 27 | 7.22 |
Outside | 133 | 4799 | 40.67 | 9 | 14.78 |
Total | 328 | 12921 | 44.86 | 36 | 9.11 |
Target | ODIs | Runs | Ave | 100s |
< 230 | 28 | 1172 | 61.68 | 4 |
> 230 | 38 | 1327 | 35.86 | 1 |
> 230 outside subcont | 17 | 427 | 25.12 | 0 |
In response to last week's column on day-night ODIs being unfair to the team chasing, a couple of readers made the valid observation that performances of each team in day games should also be taken into account before announcing that playing under lights was unjust. ("I would expect that teams batting first have a better win ratio in day games as well as it seems harder to chase on a sometimes wearing pitch," wrote a reader.) The numbers for day matches over the last three years were duly worked out, and the results are unexpectedly skewed: all teams except Australia and Pakistan do far better when chasing, thus suggesting that teams bowling first utilise the advantage of the freshness of the track in the morning, while batting becomes considerably easier in the afternoon.
Day games | Day-night games | |||||
Bat 1st win % | Bat 2nd win % | Diff | Bat 1st win % | Bat 2nd win % | Diff | |
Australia | 91.66 | 84.62 | 7.04 | 80.95 | 58.33 | 22.62 |
England | 31.25 | 80 | -48.75 | 47.37 | 23.08 | 24.29 |
Kenya | 15.38 | 20 | -4.62 | 20 | 14.29 | 5.71 |
India | 42.11 | 66.67 | -24.56 | 58.62 | 40.91 | 17.71 |
New Zealand | 36.36 | 55.56 | -19.2 | 38.1 | 37.04 | 1.06 |
Pakistan | 48.27 | 40 | 8.27 | 76.67 | 69.56 | 7.11 |
South Africa | 50 | 72.73 | -22.73 | 78.95 | 53.85 | 25.1 |
Sri Lanka | 61.11 | 62.5 | -1.39 | 61.29 | 26.32 | 34.97 |
West Indies | 34.62 | 63.33 | -28.71 | 58.33 | 9.09 | 49.24 |
Zimbabwe | 22.22 | 32.14 | -9.92 | 37.5 | 15 | 22.5 |