Mini stats

After last week's semi-final loss, I thought it was time for another end-of-season blog. But today's game is a "consolation final", and therefore still part of the previous season. So instead, here's a few random little bits and pieces that I've thought about or been asked about over the last few weeks and months.
Losing on shirts
Teams are (usually) penalised 5 runs for each player on their team whose shirt does not match their team's shirt. For more than 250 Popped Collars games, there was never an occurrence of those penalties making a difference in who won or lost a match. But it has now happened twice in just a couple of months - unfortunately, both going against us. And even more unfortunately, one of them in a semi-final.

Lourigan's Wickets
With Andrew becoming a "semi-regular player", or a "regular sub", or whatever you want to call it, it's time he had a stat. He used to regularly ask about his wicket-taking in his early games. He claimed that in his first handful of games to have had one great game with the ball, but barely taken a single wicket other than that.

So here are the bowling figures for A.Lourigan in his 14 matches so far:

Opponents	Figures
Underarm	0/43
Kaz Electronics	0/26
Toros	4/19
Juicy Ham	0/25
Juicy Ham	0/33
Founding Fathers	0/27
Modern Gurus	0/34
Dirty Gypsies	2/17
It's On Like Donkey Kong	2/15
Thrill Killers	0/31
Them Again	3/20
Juicy Ham	1/25
Modern Gurus	3/15
Thrill Killers	3/12

Well, yep, he was spot on. In 6 of his first 7 matches he went wicketless, only breaking the run with a 4-wicket haul. And remarkably that 4/19 was against Toros - the competition's top side.

Rian and Gareth: Breaking the partnership
A few weeks ago Brad decided to change up the batting partnerships, both because we were missing a few regulars and because he had a cunning plan for trying to win certain skins. It's certainly something that's been done before, but splitting up Rian and Gareth as a pair was an unexpected - and very rare - thing to do. Have those two ever played a game together where they didn't bat together? And if so, how long ago was it?

Rian has played 225 games and Gareth has 213. There have been 174 games which they both played. They have batted together 156 times, and on one occasion they batted together twice in one match.

This means that in total there have been only 19 out of 174 matches which they both played but were not paired up as batters.

Two of those 19 games were the recent ones which brought up the topic. Prior to that, there were two games about a year ago (August 2014 and April 2014). The most common period of time that they were separated was during our time playing 6-a-side at Kaleen - there were 8 games during those two seasons that they didn't bat together.

In fact - they aren't even the champions of regularly batting together. Julian and Xavier hold that title, having played 92 games together, and batted together in 91 of them.