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...