Posted by Cricket has generally got more time for stats than for its own personal hygiene, yet those for Twenty20 are surprisingly useless.
A good batting average can be counterproductive if not allied to a decent strike-rate. A decent bowling economy rate can be misleading if it’s just the result of that player’s batting colleagues failing to ever set a challenging score. Wickets aren’t quite so important in a format where teams are rarely bowled out.
Yet we need something
We flatly refuse to watch much of the Friends Provident T20 because there are 10 billion matches and because half of them are overshadowed by Tests. Statistics are our fall-back.
We have concluded that the number of runs a player has scored is a half-decent measure of their worth (even if it does favour top-order batsmen).
Top scorers
Adam Voges has so far scored most runs in this season’s Twenty20 Cup. We don’t care about him because he’s Australian and also because he pronounces his name ‘Vo-jizz,’ which is clearly wrong.
The second highest scorer is Phil Mustard, so we can state with some certainty that in terms of Twenty20 cricket this year, Phil Mustard is the best-performing beef-eating, gout-suffering, Durham wicketkeeper-batsman named as one to watch in 2011 on this website.
No, wait, we’re wrong. We said you should watch him last year. Also, we forgot that this year’s ones to watch related only to performances in the top division of the County Championship. We probably can’t blame statistics for those errors, but might do so anyway.
There are already a set of T20-specific statistics in operation, widely used to assess what matters in a player’s performance:
Sixes per second
Sponsorship opportunities per over
Shirt sales per salary pound
With a name like Mustard, our Phil must rate highly for the second of those.
Well, apparently Luke Wright is the most valuable player in this season’s T20.
Tells me about all I need to know about the value of that particular set of rankings.
What about the leading wicket taker?
That’s got to count for something – every wicket’s a dot ball!
And according to Robin Jackman, dot balls are gold dust. Ergo, wickets are gold. But wickets are men. So men are gold. Gold men. Goldman. Goldman Sachs. Collapse of world economy. Collapse of batting order. This mean more dot balls. More gold dust. More men. More collapse.
SHIT! DAN IS A COMMIE BASTARD.
Let’s not forget that gold dust defeats Cybermen.
Always thought ‘Cyberman’ would make a great surname.
Like Chapman or Coleman.
Gold beats Cybermen.
Susanna Hoffs beats Gold (in my book, anyway).
Cybermen beat Susanna Hoffs (I don’t know this for sure, but I think it’s likely).
So all we need now is a set of simple actions representing Gold, Cybermen and Susanna Hoffs.
That’s a hell of a response to my first post, comrade?
However you dress it up 20/20 is shite.
Although Tim Phillips must love it as it guarantees him a contract with Essex every year despite the fact he can’t buy a wicket in proper cricket.
It is largely shite, but yesterday brought forth a match containing a hat-trick, a five-fer and a century. That wasn’t shite.