Making the finals is a fairly regular occurrence for the Popped Collars. In fact, the only season we didn't make the finals was that final season at Lyneham when we were constantly behind on our match fees and so got no points for all our wins. If I recall correctly, we won enough matches to have finished somewhere in the top 2 if we had paid up.
Anyway, on with the stats.
Today, we're looking at player averages in finals matches - and comparing those averages to their career stats, to see who handles the pressure the best!
Popped Collars and GG have played in 6 finals series. 5 out of those 6 times, we won the semi-final, and went on to the grand-final. At one stage we had a perfect record of 3 grand-final appearances for 3 wins. We then lost our latest two deciders (against Tuff Stuff at Lyneham, and last season against Gold Diggers).
That gives us an overall record of 11 finals matches, 8 wins, 3 losses. That's more or less on par with our overall record of about 75% wins.
Three players - Brad, Xavier and Rian - have played all 11 of those matches.
Batting
We could just look at the basic batting stats for all players in finals, but that's probably not going to be too interesting. We want to know who rises to the occasion, and who falls in a heap. So I've added two extra columns to the standard table of averages below.
The second last column shows each player's overall career average, and the last column the difference between the two averages (a positive number means they perform better in finals).
| Player | Matches | Innings | Runs | Average (finals) | Average (career) | Difference |
| Xavier | 11 | 11 | 263 | 23.91 | 24.48 | -0.57 |
| Brad | 11 | 11 | 255 | 23.18 | 24.14 | -0.96 |
| Gareth | 7 | 7 | 118 | 16.86 | 17.87 | -1.01 |
| Rian | 11 | 11 | 245 | 22.27 | 25.64 | -3.37 |
| Andy | 8 | 8 | 131 | 16.38 | 19.85 | -3.48 |
| Jake | 7 | 7 | 102 | 14.57 | 18.51 | -3.94 |
| Matt | 4 | 4 | 28 | 7 | 11.72 | -4.72 |
| Julian | 8 | 8 | 128 | 16 | 22.46 | -6.46 |
| Sanjit | 8 | 8 | 66 | 8.25 | 14.73 | -6.48 |
| Jim | 3 | 3 | -3 | -1 | 16.56 | -17.56 |
Well... unfortunately, no one bats better in finals! I suppose it is to be expected - finals games will always be against the best of the opposing teams from throughout the season.
Jim Ragg has his stats let down by one atrocious performance (-27 in a semi-final against the 4Skins). One Brad remembers well, apparently.
But is batting the weakness? Or do we just perform worse all-round in finals?
Bowling
Here you will see that we actually, overall, perform better when bowling in finals! Some people are up, some people are down - but collectively our bowling improves over our usual stats.
(Again, a positive number in the last column indicates a better performance in finals)
| Player | Overs | Wickets | Runs | Avg.Game (finals) | Avg.Game (career) | Difference |
| Matt | 8 | 11 | 51 | 12.75 | 19.48 | 6.73 |
| Andy | 16 | 15 | 57 | 7.13 | 13.21 | 6.09 |
| Jim | 6 | 8 | 8 | 2.67 | 7.77 | 5.10 |
| Brad | 22 | 27 | 123 | 11.18 | 14.62 | 3.44 |
| Jake | 14 | 13 | 100 | 14.29 | 17.28 | 2.99 |
| Gareth | 14 | 14 | 96 | 13.71 | 13.61 | -0.10 |
| Xavier | 22 | 23 | 159 | 14.45 | 13.75 | -0.70 |
| Sanjit | 16 | 10 | 125 | 15.63 | 14.82 | -0.81 |
| Rian | 22 | 18 | 135 | 12.27 | 10.18 | -2.09 |
| Julian | 16 | 10 | 161 | 20.13 | 17.83 | -2.30 |
So it looks like Matt is the man to turn to this week (and next week, if required) as the finals specialist. He improves by almost 7 runs per game with the ball. Brad should also lead by example, having the lowest finals average among those who will be playing.
But it's the Ragg brothers we need to get back in the team! If they stuck to their averages, they would bowl 4 overs between them for less than 10 runs.
Overall
Here's the totals for the 6 players who will play in this finals series. All up, we play just over 10 runs worse than average in the big games. But remember, the overall stats include a lot of one-sided games that bump up everyone's averages. You don't expect matches like that at this end of the season.
| Player | Batting Difference | Bowling Difference | Total |
| Brad | -0.96 | +3.44 | +2.48 |
| Matt | -4.72 | +6.73 | +2.01 |
| Gareth | -1.01 | -0.10 | -1.11 |
| Xavier | -0.57 | -0.70 | -1.27 |
| Rian | -3.37 | -2.09 | -5.46 |
| Sanjit | -6.48 | -0.81 | -7.29 |
| -------- | ----- | ----- | ----- |
| TOTAL | -17.11 | +6.47 | -10.64 |
Overall, todays stats seem to indicate that finals matches are lower scoring matches than usual. Perhaps players bat more carefully - perhaps the fielders are more switched on. And perhaps we can use this as motivation: "If we bat well, the stats say we will win. If we bat badly, the stats say we have a good chance of defending the score."
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