Wicket-type specialists

As is often the case, an interesting fact from the previous game sparks a thought from someone which turns into a blog post. Last match, Xavier took 4 wickets, all of which were bowled. It has never seemed that bowling batsmen out was a strength of his, but something must have gone right for this one week. Let's extract some stats.


Career wickets taken
First of all, let's check the idea that 'bowled' is a rare way for Xavier to take wickets. Below is a table showing the percentage of wicket-types that each player takes.

I've coloured the highest 3 percentages for each type in green squares, and the lowest 3 in orange. With that you can pick out the players who have strength in taking certain types of wickets over others (i.e. those with numerous coloured squares in their row) and the "all-round" players who just take a bit of each.

 Far from "rarely" bowling batsmen out, Xavier is something of the stand-out "all-round" bowler, not being in the top or bottom 3 for any wicket type.

Daniel, Jim, Andy and Brad take the titles of "Lord of [wicket type]". Although, for Jim, being Lord of Run Outs off your bowler is not really any kind of achievement.

I'm ignoring the "Other" column because it's mostly meaningless - no one has more than 3 "other" wickets.

Wickets of a type in a match
Another question to ponder: is 4 bowled in one match a record? Or close to it?
Well, sort of. It's equal to the record for two overs - but there is one instance of a player disturbing the batsmans' stumps 5 times in 3 overs in a match. And that record is held by.... well, by Xavier, surprisingly.

It was in that classic "300 run win with four players" match (see note at the bottom of this post)

Here's the most of each wicket type taken in a game:

Type	Wickets	Bowler	Team	Date
Caught	6	Daniel*	Popped Collars	22 Aug 2011
		Jarrod	Stimulated	26 Jun 2012
		Ronnie	CU Next Tuesday	7 Aug 2012
Run Out	7	Andy*	GG	16 Apr 2010
	6	Rod*	Rebels	2 May 2011
		Bren**	Boonies	19 Apr 2010
Bowled	5	Xavier*	GG	16 Apr 2010
	4	Gareth	Popped Collars	20 Jun 2011
		Brad	GG	20 Aug 2010
		Scott	CU Next Tuesday	7 Aug 2012
		Xavier	Popped Collars	24 May 2013
Stumped	3	Andy	Big 4 Bandits	9 Nov 2009
		Rian	Popped Collars	6 Dec 2010
		Ben*	4 Skins	28 Feb 2011
		Brad*	Popped Collars	21 Mar 2011
		Nathan**	Pimp My Side	30 May 2011
		Rob	Four Skins	6 Mar 2012
		Brad	Popped Collars	30 Nov 2012
Mankad	4	Tom	ASG	7 Feb 2011
	2	Joe	Take That	24 Jan 2011

Each star indicates that the bowler bowled an additional over in the match.
All types that are not listed have had a maximum of 1 taken in a match.

Both the bowled and run-out records come from that same game.
The final entry in the "stumped" list was a hat-trick of them by Brad.

Well might you ask: "How did we let someone take 4 mankads in a game??"
I remember that game; none of our batsmen were taking advantage and sneaking out of their crease - this Tom character was just grabbing wickets by not releasing the ball and finding people whose bat had slid out of the crease.
First skin, he got three of them in one over. He started by getting Julian twice in a row, then got Xavier later in the over (I remember that one clearly; my bat blatantly short of the line. Stuck - as I tried to slide it back -  on the uneven join between the regular green carpet and the the white line). In Tom's second over (the final over of the game) he got Andy before even bowling the first ball.

And by batters...
Of course, we can't do all these stats for bowlers taking wickets without seeing which batsmen are good at getting out certain ways.

I have very briefly looked at this before, but here I'll give a nice table (same as for the bowling) of the percentages of wicket-type each batter loses. This table may offer our batsmen some advice on how to improve their game, by showing which wicket you lose more or less often than others. Food for thought for tonight's game.

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Note: The observant reader will note that the 300 run win was not a Popped Collars game, but a six-a-side GG game. I've recently finished getting all the GG stats into my database, and have started writing a blog post for sometime in the next few weeks looking back at those good old days.
All career stats shown in this blog still only count Popped Collars games, but you may occasionally see a GG stat show up among lists of records.