Outdoor Stats

This week's question sprouted from an email conversation about last weeks stats. People were getting stuck into their batting partners about strike farming, and Gareth decided that it's perfectly fine to claim more of the strike, so long as you are scoring plenty of runs from those balls. He therefore wanted to know about players' strike rates.

So let's check out strike rates, along with a few other stats that are usually associated with regular (outdoor) cricket, but have less meaning when examining the indoor version.

Strike Rate
First up is classic outdoor-cricket-style strike rate. Number of runs you score per 100 balls - not counting negative runs for getting out, not counting doubles for jackpot ball. Just the straight number of runs you accumulate in between getting out. The only thing different from the outdoor version is that is does count extras on to your score, and does count extras as a ball faced.

And G, it looks like you were right... asking about this stat did indeed come back to bite you.

Name	Balls	Runs	S/R
Brad	703	1470	209.1
Xavier	761	1384	181.9
Julian	617	1118	181.2
Rian	611	1051	172.0
Jake	602	993	165.0
Andy	702	1124	160.1
Gareth	617	945	153.2
Sanjit	611	824	134.9

And now we'll count "indoor strike rate" which counts negative runs and doubled runs. It's simply total career score compared to balls faced.

Name	Balls	Score	S/R
Brad	703	1070	152.2
Xavier	761	979	128.6
Julian	617	793	128.5
Rian	611	731	119.6
Jake	602	598	99.3
Gareth	617	610	98.9
Andy	702	610	86.9
Sanjit	611	424	69.4

Outdoor average

This is looking at the number of runs a batsman scores for each time he gets out. Once again, we are not counting negative runs for losing a wicket or doubled runs for jackpot balls; only counting the runs a batter accumulates between the fall of his own wickets.

Name	Runs	Wkts	Average
Brad	1234	77	16.03
Julian	943	62	15.21
Rian	924	62	14.90
Xavier	1140	78	14.62
Gareth	798	65	12.28
Andy	925	76	12.17
Jake	874	76	11.50
Sanjit	628	80	7.85

5-Wicket Hauls

The standard milesotne for bowlers to acheive in a single game is the 5-wicket-innings. Let's see how often that has happened for Popped Collars players in the indoor game.

Name	5WM
Gareth	5
Xavier	4
Andy	3
Brad	2
Jake	2
Rian	1
Josh	1
James	1

Batting milestones

With the bat, it's all about scoring multiples of 50 in the outdoor game. What about indoor... looking at 50s and 100s would give some very uninteresting stats. So I've chosen multiples of 10 as the benchmark. Starting at 20 - I don't think scoring 10 is much of an acheivement. For most people.

Name	20s	30s	40s	50s
Brad	30	13	4	-
Xavier	26	17	2	1
Julian	25	7	-	-
Rian	19	8	3	1
Jake	15	3	-	-
Andy	20	7	2	-
Gareth	15	3	1	-
Sanjit	8	1	-	-

Gareth's self-confidence booster

The question of the week this week, was very simple. Gareth began by asking which bowlers had taken the most wickets for our team, and was disappointed to learn that Xavier and Brad led the way, simply because they have played the most games.

And so the question was refined: Which bowler has the most wickets per over?

A simple question... and so I generalised it, and shall investigate a range of questions of the form

Who [does something] [most/least often] per [unit of time/cricket]?

1. Who takes the most wickets per over?
It quickly became apparent that Gareth had a good reason for asking his question... he wanted to make himself look good. Here's the table of results

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
2. Who hits the most 7s per innings?
Here’s the sloggers. Or at least, the most successful sloggers. If only there were stats for ‘attempted 7s’

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
3. Who faces the most balls per innings?
With this question we’re revealing the strike-hoggers. The people who face more than their fair share of the 32 balls each pair gets when they go in to bat.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
4. Who gets the most extra turns at batting and bowling?
There were a few sceptics last week when Brad went back in to bat when we were a player short. And this stat gives justification to those people who can now see that our leader bowls and bats for missing players much more often than anyone else. Is this leading from the front and putting himself in the firing line – showing how it’s done with additional inspirational captains knocks? Or is it just abuse of power?

Going for the 9

An ongoing joke among the Popped Collars chaps is to challenge each other to “Go for the 9!” - which is to go out to bat and attempt to get out via all 9 different types of wicket that exist in Indoor Cricket. The 9 ways are: bowled, caught, stumped, run-out, LBW, third-ball, hit-wicket, interference, mankad.

There are 4 types that are far-and-away the most common wicket types: caught, run-out, bowled and stumped. The other 5 are rarities.

No one has yet seriously attempted the feat, but today's question-of-the-week arose from the idea of seeing who has gone the closest...

Who has been out in the most different ways in a single innings?

Representative Cricket... a grade below

Round 2 of the 2010 Super League, and Weston Blast were looking for more players, and Popped Collars players were again the target of the "selectors". Brad this week made his debut, joining 1-match vetrans Xavier and Andy. But this week their services were required in division 3 - one level below what the boys played last week.

And what a difference one grade made!

Division 2 seemed a competition that truly involved the most skilled of players from the various cricket centres. Both the Weston and Goulburn team involved in last weeks matches were composed of players that even the best of the Popped Collars would have (or did) only just have the skills to be competitive - and the Lyneham team on the court next door (of which I know most of the players) would have been even better than both of us.

Division 3 was... well... laughable. Quite literally as far as I was concerned; I spent a lot of time between balls chuckling at the goings on. Both the Weston team we were playing for and the Kambah team we were playing against would have been (or were) better off having even the weakest of the Popped Collars players on board. The overall quality of the game was below what we experience every week in the standard Monday night competition.

Brad's concerns about his bowling were irrelevant as he continually beat the bat and picked up wickets. Andy was bowling too quick for anyone to get onto properly. Mis-fields went by without concern or comment, as it was the norm. Brad and Xavier put on a partnership of 69 without ever getting above about 2nd gear.

Weston won the game, but if the match was representative of the rest of the grade, the Popped Collars could take them all down and win this competition any day.

Representative Cricket

Last Friday night a phone call came in asking Xavier and Andy to play for the Weston team in the ACT Super-League competition. For the uninformed, this is a competition between the various indoor cricket centres in the region (Lyneham, Weson, Kambah and Goulburn) - ideally consisting of the "best" players from each centre. It's played in 3 grades with centres able to enter multiple teams per division if they want.

This was not the most ordinary way to be spending a Saturday night, but Xavier and Andy accepted the invitation (aka selection) and showed up to give it a go. The match was a low-scoring encounter in the 'twos' (ie second division) competition against the team from Goulburn, under the watchful eye of everyone's favourite Lyneham umpire, Dean. Weston Blast were victorious 70-45.

Pre-game, the Popped Collars boys gleaned much amusement from the team huddles that were taking place after each over and/or wicket... and more amusement when they realised that their own team would be doing it as well! Indeed, the games and teams were/are even more serious than Brad or Jake at their most serious. Xavier took a few attempts to work out what the boys were chanting at the break-up of each of the huddles (turned out it was "Blast!", the team name). Andy, meanwhile, did know the correct exclamation, but decided to mix it up a bit by saying whatever other rhyming word he could come up with at the time... "Fast!"... "Last!"... "Cast!"...

For the record, Andy bowled 3/5 and Xavier 4/-6 with two absolute sitters also dropped off his bowling... no fielders names shall be mentioned, but Andy did comment after the game that he now "knows how Sanjit feels" having been placed fielding at point, and forced to deal with balls bouncing out of the corners. They then scored 2 and 4 respectively with the bat in a failed attempt to chase a skin of 13. The bowlers were no better than the good bowlers that the Popped Collars would encounter week to week, but the new challenge was dealing with a full team of good fielders, in strategic and well placed fielding locations.

The best demonstration of this was the final ball they faced, which Xavier punched to the side net for a safe two, to tie the skin. That is, it would have been safe in any regular game - but on this occasion, the fielder in close jumped up and batted the ball back to the 'keeper for a direct hit with one stump to aim at. Andy was short of his ground and the expected tied skin turned into a 7-run loss.

Good times, but Saturday night and $17 a game... not something to be done too regularly... espeically when one is already playing Friday and Monday nights as it is!