Xavier gets bowled. Brad and Rian score 8s.

Brad scored 8 runs off consecutive deliveries, and Xavier was bowled twice in one over. These two events sparked questions - and in the first case, further events - which form the basis of this week's blog. Probably the last for 2012...

Stumpings and Negative-tens

Last week's match brought about a few unusual things. Popped Collars made scores of 58, 56, 54 in their three skins. Brad and Xavier teamed up for a hat-trick of stumpings, and there were three other stumpings during the innings. And Popped Collars took a wicket on each of the three double-score balls, wiping 30 runs off the opposition's total. We also had a record-equaling 11th consecutive win.

Here is collection of quick stats about these intriguing numbers.

Runs in a calendar year

From the email, Gareth - inspired by the recent exploits of Michael Clarke - asks about runs in a calendar year. For the Popped Collars, obviously the players who play most often are going to have the most runs, but it will still be interesting just to see what the numbers are.

Consistency within the team (now with bowling)

The scorecard for last week's game showed a very consistent batting performance from the Popped Collars' batters. Highest score 28, lowest 22. This was actually incorrect - the umpire was apparently incapable of adding up. Nevertheless, it gave us this week's stat-to-discuss.

Bowling by over number

Batting in the first skin is good - according to the stats. Different people have different strengths and weaknesses, based on where in the innings they bowl - according to the stats. But now, we look a little deeper. Within each skin, would you prefer to bowl the first over? ...the second over? ...the last over? What do the stats say?

Bowling by position number

Bowling stats by skin position number... unimaginative, perhaps, following last week's blog, but it was requested anyway. It may seem to be a redundant thing to look at... surely people bowl worse in the first pair (where the higher runs are scored) and better in third. Well, maybe - we shall see what we see.

Batting by position number

Here's a question from Sanjit to get everyone in the mood for some Friday night indoor cricket.

Sanjit asked about the performance of batting pairs based on position in the innings. That is, how well does the opening partnership do compared to the pair who bat second, and third, and fourth.

As a side note: While doing this, I noticed something that I hadn't spotted before. The Popped Collars last game at Lyneham was actually their 150th match! Well done lads... onwards to 200!!

An old post, and an older scorecard

A few intriguing questions and stats were proposed for the latest blog post. The one I choose to look at today is batting hat-tricks and consecutive wickets lost... if only because it gives me an excuse to share with you an olde indoor cricket memory of mine. Enjoy.

Farewell to A.Ragg

Along with the recent loss of the National Indoor Cricket Center  the Popped Collars suffered another unexpected loss, with one of its great players, Andy Ragg, leaving the team to pursue non-indoor-cricket related opportunities elsewhere.

Welcome to Kaleen

With the closing down of the National Indoor Cricket Centre, the Popped Collars have been forced to move. With dwindling players numbers, it was off to play the 6-a-side competition in Kaleen. Two weeks ago was the team's first match at the new venue - so here is a blog post full of small quick stats and stories from those first two matches.

Why Rian and Gareth should bat again

This season has seen many a game played with less than 8 players. Therefore, it has seen many opportunities for Popped Collars players to have a extra innings, or to bowl some extra overs. This week, we ask the question:

How well do different players perform when they are chosen (or choose themselves!) to bat or bowl the additional inning/overs?

Stats from last week's run-chase

Well, what a cracking game last week.
It doesn't matter that there's no stat-of-the-week suggestions, and that we've already been through all the email requests. Let's just reminisce about this most recent game, and see what interesting numbers come out of it...

Working for your runs

With no stat suggestions arising from last week's match, we today take a request from the email - from Owen Dive, of Canberra, Australia

Mr Dive points out that a large number of "runs" in indoor cricket are scored without the batsmen actually having to run - for instance, by hitting the ball into the net, or having the bowler deliver wides and no-balls. He therefore wants to know which batsmen score the most actual 'runs' - by physically running from one crease to the other.

Extra runs

This week's question comes from Mr Andrew Ragg, from Canberra, Australia. Perhaps due to his own infamous reputation as a bowler of wides, he asks:

What is the greatest percentage of runs a team has scored from extras?

If we paid...

Popped Collars have struggled for players this season (as we saw a few weeks back). For this reason, we have also struggled to collect a full team worth of match fees each week. While we are behind on payment, we receive no competition points each week, no matter the outcome of the game. All we achieve by winning matches and skins is preventing other teams from scoring points.

Now imagine we live in an alternate reality, where the Popped Collars had no trouble getting together a full team and paying a full team worth of match fees each week this season. In the alternate universe, the ladder for this season's competition would look rather different. Well, actually, there'd only be one difference: would be well up the ladder, rather than miles last. This week's stat is simply:

Where would we be on the ladder if we had kept up to date paying our match fees each week?

Third Dot Ball: Batsmen

Continuing from last week, where we looked at the glory of bowling third-balls, it's now time to look at the unfortunate business of having to face them while in bat.

This is pretty much going to be a copy and paste of last week with the batting stats and commentary in place of the bowling ones.

Fourth Ball: Bonus Stat

While looking through the "third dot ball" stats, I found that there have been 6 occasions during Popped Collars history where there have been too many dot ball in a row. Obviously just times where the umpire has not noticed that he should call 'third ball' and has let an extra one go.

Four of them were split across consecutive overs, allowing 3 consecutive balls to be bowled with no score off them. The other two were 'double-score' balls which were not counted as two dots, as the rules of the Weston Competition said they should be.

Four of them were while we were batting - two of them while we were bowling. So we've actually got the better of it.

Third Ball: Score Must Change

After seeing Brad send down consecutive dot balls and have the next one smacked to the back net, Andy proposed that was something that seemed to happen quite often.

This week's blog will check out all sorts of details relating to "third ball". And after I made a point of saying the 'consecutive balls' stats that I did last time, it turned out that this was even more tedious. But whatever...

Streaks of outs and not-out

Back with one of my previous indoor cricket teams, this was one of my favourite stats. So I'm going to round out the week of posts with it.

When the team (or player) was in poor batting form, we would pull out this particular stat, and challenge people to try to set new records. It mostly worked quite well, as long as people were actually interested in attempting to achieve it. I always say about indoor batting: "If you don't get out while you're batting, you will make a decent score", and that's what this stat is about.

How long a streak of balls-faced can a player accumulate in between losing wickets?

The streak counts across innings and matches - so, for example, if you manage to play half a dozen consecutive innings without losing a wicket, you could rack up 100 or so deliveries faced.

Milestones

In international cricket, there's always great excitement when someone reaches something-thousand test runs, or something-hundred wickets, plays their one hundredth test, or scores their 100th international century. And so on.

Here's a quick look at some upcoming milestones (both good and bad) for the Popped Collars players.

Regular Partners

Carrying on from yesterday when I said I had some ideas for things to check out with partnerships, here's just one of those ideas. Do our batsmen perform better or worse when they are in with their regular batting partner? For example, surely Brad and Sanjit drag each other down and up respectively.

Partnership Basics

Just a quick little one today. Partly because I don't have so much time, and partly because I'm running out of more exciting ideas. A few people have asked before about partnership stats, so here's a start.

There's a bunch of other things I can think of to do with the partnership numbers - I'll check them out on the weekend. For the moment, here's the basics for our most common batting pairs (at least 5 times batted together)

Few wickets, few runs

Another story from a few games back. Xavier bats with fill-in player Asif. Xavier plays a fairly regular kind of innings, except that he doesn't face many balls, and Asif continually gets run out off the few balls he does face. Xavier ends up with a score of 5, despite only losing 1 wicket himself. The claim is that this is the lowest score made by someone only getting out once.

Here are the highest and lowest scores, sorted by number of wickets lost...

Big pairs letting the team down

Here's something interesting that happened a couple of weeks ago:
Popped Collars batted first with Jules and X posting the highest partnership for the team. When the opposition came into bat, they successfully chased that high skin, but lost all of the other three.

Has such a thing happened before?

Who needs a full team?

With 2 consecutive weeks with no game for the Popped Collars, we all need something to fill the indoor cricket void. So here we go, with 7 short posts - 1 per day for the next week, leading up to our next game (presumably) next Tuesday night.

Today's Stat of the Day, as requested by Brad, is to look at the team's results based on how many players we have.

Eight players is a full team, and most of the time we have had that many. Although it does often feel that we have a disproportionately good record when we are missing players - which should be a disadvantage.

End Of Season 2011/12: The Team

And so ends another season of indoor cricket for the Popped Collars. The fifth season for the team - but only the fourth complete season, because we abandoned the Weston 2011 season before it was over. Of those 4 seasons, we have made 3 grand finals, and this was the first time we have lost the deciding game. Not that this was an unexpected result, given the stats from throughout the season.

Low contributions to winning sides

Last week's game was an absolute thriller, with Rian's bowling, and a top bit of fielding by Brad on the back net on the last ball, saving the game for the Popped Collars on the last 3 balls. However, after the game, Gareth was all about his own personal performance... for the poor quality, rather than the good, that his stats showed. He scored -15 with the bat, and went for 41 runs from his two overs bowled, for a contribution of -56. Thus he asked the question:

What is the lowest contribution by a player on a winning team?

Most Sevens, but still negative

....and we're back.

My stats database is up-to-date with all Popped Collars games (I have grand plans to eventually go back and put in what scorecards I have from pre-Popped Collars days, as well as the full set of GG six-a-side matches from a few seasons ago). I promise nothing much at the moment, other than to keep the Popped Collars scorecards up to date, and to a weekly "Stat of the Week" (SotW) post.

So let's get underway...

Last night, in our poorly batting performance again Tuff Stuff, with the result of the game already beyond doubt, Rian and Gareth went in at the end and just had a dig. As is often the case, there were many big hits - but also many wickets.

At one point, the pair went through 10 balls, containing 3 sevens and 4 wickets, prompting Andy to pose this week's question:

"What is the most sevens a pair has hit, and still ended up with a negative score?"