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...

Streaks of outs and not-out

Back with one of my previous indoor cricket teams, this was one of my favourite stats. So I'm going to round out the week of posts with it.

When the team (or player) was in poor batting form, we would pull out this particular stat, and challenge people to try to set new records. It mostly worked quite well, as long as people were actually interested in attempting to achieve it. I always say about indoor batting: "If you don't get out while you're batting, you will make a decent score", and that's what this stat is about.

How long a streak of balls-faced can a player accumulate in between losing wickets?

The streak counts across innings and matches - so, for example, if you manage to play half a dozen consecutive innings without losing a wicket, you could rack up 100 or so deliveries faced.

Milestones

In international cricket, there's always great excitement when someone reaches something-thousand test runs, or something-hundred wickets, plays their one hundredth test, or scores their 100th international century. And so on.

Here's a quick look at some upcoming milestones (both good and bad) for the Popped Collars players.

Regular Partners

Carrying on from yesterday when I said I had some ideas for things to check out with partnerships, here's just one of those ideas. Do our batsmen perform better or worse when they are in with their regular batting partner? For example, surely Brad and Sanjit drag each other down and up respectively.

Partnership Basics

Just a quick little one today. Partly because I don't have so much time, and partly because I'm running out of more exciting ideas. A few people have asked before about partnership stats, so here's a start.

There's a bunch of other things I can think of to do with the partnership numbers - I'll check them out on the weekend. For the moment, here's the basics for our most common batting pairs (at least 5 times batted together)