5th March, 2018. When a T20 batsman's data is analysed on TV, or in the media, it is often just their career or career in tournament averages and strike rates which are used - data which has the propensity to misrepresent a player. I've discussed previously that these are flawed metrics to consider - career data fails to take into account player improvement or decline to a strong enough extent, while career in tournament averages data often falls victim to small sample sizes and by definition, variance. In the future, it will be interesting to see how this changes, and I'd suggest that as a basic measure, a 24 or 36 month rolling average and strike rate would give a decent balance between sample size and recency relevance. However, there are a variety of metrics that can be used to establish the playing style of a T20 batsman, and for this article, I wanted to go into a little more depth with some other ways to assess batsmen. Essentially, these are how a batsman performs when they face a minimum of 15 balls (at least 12.5% of the batting resources of their team) - enough balls faced to make a reasonable impact on a team's innings. By the end of this article, these will show how we can profile the playing style of various high-profile T20 batsmen around the world - information that will be of great use to national teams and franchises. Firstly, I compiled a list of 39 players, comprising of both high-profile T20 batsmen and T20 franchise regulars, and these are listed below, complete with their completed innings to 15 Ball+ innings ratio in all major T20 leagues (PSL, IPL, T20 Blast, CPL, Ramslam, BPL, Big Bash) and T20 internationals from the end of the 2016-17 Big Bash onwards. Effectively, this is the last complete edition of each event plus this year's PSL, including matches played yesterday, on the 4th March. This ratio is pretty straightforward - it is simply a player's completed innings figure in this time span divided by the amount of times they played an innings of at least 15 balls. It's worth noting that this figure could actually be less than 1, if a player played a considerable number of not-out innings, although no player in the sample managed this feat. Using such a ratio enables us to establish the regularity of batsmen to play innings of at least 15 balls - a player with a low ratio frequently reached the 15 ball mark, while a player with a high ratio often got out early in their innings:-
We can see that the likes of AB de Villiers, Travis Head and Steve Smith were very solid, almost always playing innings of at least a 15-ball duration, and with these players, teams can be confident of having players to build a platform around. The likes of Shoaib Malik, Babar Azam and Hashim Amla also featured strongly in this metric - probably quite unsurprisingly - but it was interesting to see players with high strike rates in D'Arcy Short, Glenn Maxwell and Evin Lewis also featuring well - their consistency in facing at least 15 balls in conjunction with strong strike rate data makes them an asset for T20 teams. At the bottom end of the scale, we can see that Kane Williamson, Kevin Pietersen, Darren Sammy, Rohit Sharma, Jason Roy and Sunil Narine were all unable to play consistent innings of at least a 15 ball duration. It's not a shock to Sammy and Narine here, with the West Indian duo both very strike-rate orientated - Narine the modern-day pinch-hitter - but it's more of a surprise to see Williamson, Pietersen and Sharma here, and I'll be discussing Williamson in more detail later. It's also interesting to see that in addition to Roy, Alex Hales, Jos Buttler and Eoin Morgan all had ratios of 1.75 or higher, making it very clear to understand why England have a propensity to collapse in T20 matches. The next area I wanted to look at was a batsman's strike rate when they face at least 15 balls, compared to all their innings. Again, I used the same period of data for sample size purposes, and here, a large negative figure would indicate that the player accelerates rapidly in innings where they face at least 15 balls (they bat much quicker as their innings progresses) while a lower negative figure or even positive figure would indicate that a player either bats in the same way at the start of their innings compared to when they have faced a number of balls, that they don't have an extra gear to accelerate their innings or even that they have a propensity to slow down - perhaps due to fatigue or astute opposition captaincy.
It would appear that there is some correlation between players who get out early in an innings (Narine, Sharma, Roy) and being able to accelerate quickly in an innings - these players appear to have the propensity to play 'hero or zero' style innings with little in between. Either they have the potential to win a match virtually single-handedly, or they get out quickly. With good recruitment, particularly with a long tail, this strategy can be pretty positive - however, as Lahore Qalanders are quickly realising in the current PSL, such a strategy without a long tail is often going to end in absolute disaster. From these numbers, other players who accelerate after slow starts include MS Dhoni and Chris Gayle - again, probably not a shock to many seasoned watchers of cricket - while Jos Buttler and Shane Watson's ability in this regard isn't entirely a surprise either. At the bottom end of the scale, Marlon Samuels, Kumar Sangakkara, Hashim Amla, Kieron Pollard, Steve Smith, Darren Sammy and Ross Taylor all found it tough to accelerate later on in an innings. From the perspective of Pollard and Sammy, it's probably reasonable to put this down to the fact that they attack from the start of their innings anyway, but for the other players, it is quite reasonable to debate whether they actually have a match-changing, high-strike rate innings in their locker. Looking at player high v low strike rates (in the same time period) when they face at least 15 balls is also very interesting indeed. Of the 39 players listed, all but 10 played at least one innings which featured a strike rate below 100 - an innings which should be avoided at all costs, as I discussed here. The high v low strike rate table is sorted by player maximum strike rate:-
Congratulations to Alex Hales, Luke Ronchi, Colin Munro, Rohit Sharma, Chris Lynn, Glenn Maxwell, Aaron Finch, Jason Roy, D'Arcy Short and Virat Kohli - these were the ten players who did not record a 15+ ball innings with a strike rate below 100, and most observers are likely to that the majority of these ten are players are relatively strike-rate orientated anyway. Establishing what a player's peak strike rate is, is useful for a variety of reasons, and it may surprise readers that 14 of the 39 players assessed did not ever record a strike rate in excess of 200 when playing a 15+ ball innings in this time period. The bottom four players - Michael Klinger, Babar Azam, Kumar Sangakkara and Steve Smith - look to have something of a ceiling here. I'm willing to cut D'Arcy Short and Virat Kohli a little more slack - Short had numerous strike rates in excess of 150, so was consistently a strong strike-rate performer, while Kohli was often forced to play anchor innings for the Royal Challengers Bangalore last season in the IPL, given the regular failures of his team-mates. Next up, I wanted to look at the percentage of innings where a player played an innings of at least 15 balls with a strike rate below 100, with players recording a high percentage having a dangerous propensity of wasting batting resources by playing a match losing innings:-
10 players had at least a 25% figure here - at least one in four of their 15+ ball innings featured a strike rate at 100 or below, and both national teams and franchises would need to be aware of this when selecting teams and recruiting players. Players who often play innings with strike rates this low are likely to have potential issues regarding either pacing an innings well, or lacking a particular skill-set which prevents them from scoring quickly (e.g. an inability to score quickly against spin bowling). In fact, of these 10 players, only Kieron Pollard scores particularly quickly against spin bowling, so without doubt, franchises in the spin-friendly sub-continent should think very carefully before recruiting this type of batsman. Regarding Kane Williamson, it's interesting to see that the media were generally very positive towards his century in narrow defeat for New Zealand against England in the ODI series last week, and I was quite surprised by this reaction. These numbers illustrate that numerous times, he's been unable to pace an innings very well, and this accusation is fair to level at the New Zealand captain again here, after he recorded an ODI strike rate of 78.32 (considerably below the format mean figure) when using 47.67% of New Zealand's batting resources. Conversely, there were a number of players very able to score at a strike rate of 150 or greater on a very consistent basis when facing at least 15 balls, and these are listed below:-
Certainly, anyone who can score at a rate in excess of 150 at least 60% of the time, as the top ten players in the table managed, are an asset for most T20 teams, and it's interesting to see both Glenn Maxwell and AB de Villiers around the top of this list, given that we established earlier that they almost always faced an innings of at least 15 balls. Both have the ability to change matches with the bat on a consistent basis. Despite a low peak strike rate, D'Arcy Short showed that he was able to consistently produce innings of a high strike rate. Any player who cannot record a strike rate greater than 150 at least 25% of the time, as the bottom eight players in the table showed, should certainly be guarded against. Kumar Sangakkara is currently performing pretty well in the PSL, and his game looks well-suited to posting 150 type totals and chasing similar figures. However, he'd almost certainly struggle with the demands in the higher scoring Big Bash, T20 Blast and IPL leagues. Having worked out the percentage that a player scores below 100 strike rate and also at least at a 150 strike rate, when facing at least 15 balls in an innings, we can then look at their negative-positive impact percentage, with an innings below 100 strike rate being perceived as negative, while an innings above 150 strike rate being positive:-
All of Glenn Maxwell, Alex Hales, Luke Ronchi, D'Arcy Short, Aaron Finch, Chris Lynn, Colin Munro, AB de Villiers and Sunil Narine managed a net positive impact percentage of at least 50%, which is highly impressive indeed. Again, these players look like being real assets for T20 teams around the world. However, seven players - Steve Smith, Babar Azam, Eoin Morgan, Kane Williamson, Ross Taylor, Marlon Samuels and Michael Klinger - recorded negative impact percentages (e.g. they played more 15+ ball innings at <=100 SR than they managed at >=150SR) and these players look like they have the ability to stagnate innings on a regular basis. Finally, it's worth looking at the percentage of times that these players managed to score at strike rates in excess of 200 when facing at least 15 balls - a potentially match-winning, or at least match-changing, display:-
Alex Hales and Sunil Narine were out on their own as the only batsmen to manage this feat over 30% of the time, with Luke Ronchi, AB de Villiers, Evin Lewis and Chris Lynn also able to do this in at least one in four innings of at least 15 balls. These players have demonstrated consistent ability to change matches on a regular basis. At the bottom of the list, perhaps we can excuse Short (consistently above 150SR but below 200SR), Kohli (carried RCB in the last IPL) and Dhoni (slow starter, quality finisher) for reasons explained earlier but the rest look like being unable to change a game with quick scoring. That's not to say that some aren't valuable players in T20 - Tamim Iqbal, Hashim Amla and Travis Head certainly are three of these with some positive aspects to their game - but these players in general are certainly more suited to playing anchor roles, which have the potential to become match-losing innings, as opposed to being able to dramatically influence a game from a positive perspective. It may also be a surprise that Brendon McCullum, Jos Buttler and Martin Guptill - three batsmen with a reputation as being high strike-rate players - scored at a 15+ ball strike rate in excess of 200 less than 10% of the time. If this article has given you insight into the data that Sports Analytics Advantage can offer cricket franchises around the world in formulating draft or auction plans, please feel free to enquire for bespoke draft and auction strategies via sportsanalyticsadvantage@gmail.com. |