Crucket

Boxing day and there is no international cricket in New Zealand. How very sad.

In fact there is not any international cricket scheduled in New Zealand until February. The better part of summer will pass with no international cricket. The bold claim by New Zealand Cricket of this being a busy summer has a gaping hole in it, namely the month and a half gap between the Pakistan series and the Bangladesh series. When we did last have a summer that included over a month of no international cricket? Ever in the modern era?

When the news emerged that Shane Bond would miss the 2nd and 3rd tests of the Pakistan series because of injury, he made a comment about considering his future. This seemed a pretty heavy thing to be thinking about when you had just a tiny abdominal tear. It was clear then that he was revisiting all the arguments that lead to his first retirement from test cricket after the South Africa tour of 2007. It seems this year’s injury reminded him why he made that decision in the first place.

There have been two contrasting reactions to Bond’s retirement. Short of a Length nominated Bond for retiree of the year with the following valediction:

Shane Bond: Shane has always been very special. He has a last name that reminds you of all those horrible chemistry classes which dwell on elastomers or something like that. He had the kind of pace and swing a national cricket board would kill for. It takes talent (and bad luck) to end up playing 18 tests over a career spanning eight years, yet to take 87 wickets at an average of 22 and strike rate of 39 in those tests. With all of that on his resume, it should come as no surprise that even in retirement Bond did something different. He retired twice in 2009! First from the ICL (who are themselves a nominee! you might say he’s a reference to the ICL in coding terms. Then again you might not…) and then from Test cricket. That makes Shane so unique that he’s almost a shoo-in to win the award.

Whereas Sportsfreak remarks:

So that’s it then. Farewell Shane Bond from test cricket. Like stardust sprinkled loosely, quite a few nice shiny bits, but no real long-term illumination. It is easier not to miss someone when you are used to missing them.

A true assessment of Shane Bond lies somewhere between the praise of the first and the harsh truth of the second. On the one hand, Shane Bond was an exceptional cricketer, with an almost unbelievable bowling average of 22.09 and a strike rate of 38.7. On the other hand, he missed many, many more tests than he played during the length of his career. But you can’t focus on one of these aspects without acknowledging the other.

With Shane Bond in the team, New Zealand won five tests for every test they lost. You simply have to be astounded by that figure. Not only was he individually outstanding, as per his individual stats, but he lifted the rest of the NZ bowling attack. If this was all you could see of Shane Bond’s record, you would have to have rated him as the best bowler in the world. However, over the length of his career, NZ actually lost more tests then they won; his impact on NZ’s record was greatly affected by his regular non-availability.

So when reflecting on Shane Bond’s retirement, it is not just the incredible talent that Short of a Length celebrates that we will miss, nor we will dwell solely on his perpetual absences, as Sportsfreak does. But rather we will rue what might have been. What we missed because of his absences. What his legacy might have been and where New Zealand cricket might now be if he had played in 3/4 of NZ’s tests during his career rather than 1/4.

It stunk that the 3rd test with Pakistan ended the way it did. But better that than the end to the 3rd Aus-WI test: Roach given out caught off Bollinger, Roach appeals, replays suggest no hot spot, no noise and no deviation and yet the decision is upheld.

Surely when the three possible evidences of an edge are negative, that is proof that there was no edge. The Roach situation is precisely the type of situation that the referral system was intended to fix.

Ah well. Australia probably would have won anyway. Great to see the Windies fighting hard though, both in this test and the 2nd. Very interesting also to see the Aussies get ugly under pressure.

Bit of a slap on the wrist for Shane Watson for his sending off of Gayle, 15% of his match fee.  But the fact that you can so easily link to a video of him being a dick is probably punishment enough. For as long as the video remains available at least. I see the the video of Benn, Haddin and Johnson pushing and swearing has been pulled from Youtube. It’s a pity, as it was interesting viewing. Watching the video it is hard to see why Benn got punished so severely. We see Benn serve up a lot of cursing, a shaping to throw and a lot of pointing. But the only deliberate forceful contact between players was Johnson pushing Benn away right at the end of the whole farrago.

I think I am entirely justified in claiming a moral victory in the last test, given that we were so clearly on target to win when the rain came. So that gives us a moral victory in the series. Unfortunately, the records will show that the series was tied 1-1.

So the first leg of the NZ-Pak-Aus tri series has been indecisive. The second leg (Aus-Pak) is due to kick off on Boxing Day.

At 90/0 chasing 208 off 43 overs, New Zealand were miles ahead of their Duckworth–Lewis target. Par score at that stage was 62.

Dammit dammit dammit dammit!

Dammit that the test had to finish like this.

Dammit that nearly five days of cricket, including O’Brien’s spell of awesome, Vettori’s century, Tuffey’s out of the blue 80, Pakistan’s fight-back, Guptill’s fight-back-back, was washed away by a scant hour of rain. In fact, that trivial shower of rain in the deciding hour of the deciding test of the series has made irrelevant the two tests that preceded it.

Dammit!

Daniel Vettori has just now been dismissed for 134. That is a stunning return on the decision to promote him. And it’s not just his own score of 134 that is worth celebrating. Vettori came in with the score at 136/4, with a first-innings lead in the balance, and departed with the score at 408 and a humongous first innings lead of 185. At 6 he can not only save an innings, he can also build big innings. This also allows Tuffey to fill the roll shepherding the lower order.

This 134, by the way, has pushed Vettori’s average over 30 for the first time (excepting his first few matches). It also pushes his average in the no. 6 spot up to above 40.

An average in the 30s is great for a bowler, good for an all-rounder, but pretty average for a batsman. So it is disheartening to note that 4 of the 5 batsmen that bat above Vettori have averages in the 20s. (Taylor, currently the world’s 9th best batsman, is the exception).

Of course, all of the junior batsmen have played so few tests that their averages are pretty volatile. Daniel Flynn for example has only dropped below 30 in this series and would be back up again if he scored a century in the next innings. Though the more innings they have, the more confident we can be that their average reflects their ability.

There is a statistical value that can measure how confident we can be about an average, called the standard error of the mean. The larger the sample size (in this case, the number of innings), the more accurate the mean (batting average in this case). The standard error of the mean is calculated (assuming several things about the statistical distribution) by dividing the mean by the square root of the sample size. So we should be able to get a measure of the reliability of a batsman’s average by dividing it by the square root of the number of innings played.

So Daniel Flynn’s average of 28.7 off 29 innings has a standard error of about 5.3. My very rudimentary and rather naive interpretation of this sort of standard error is that we can be only 63% certain that he is not batting at an average of 30 or higher and has just been unlucky.

For Guptill (avg. 23.5, 14 innings) we can be only 93% certain that his average shouldn’t be 30. Whereas for McIntosh, we can be only 79% certain that he is not hiding an average of 30 behind his current average of 26.41 off 18 innings.

Now, B-J Watling, this test’s debutante, has scored a mere 18 runs, giving him a disappointing average of 18. However, the standard error of this average is itself 18. This means that even with this poor start to his career, we can only suggest with 83% certainty that he won’t score 30 runs in every innings here on in.

(Any of this make sense?)

By the way, we can be 99.8% certain Flynn shouldn’t be averaging 40, but only 96% certain for Watling. Two ways of saying “definitely” I suppose.

You may have heard that Daniel Vettori is the best ever no. 8 batsman. He has scored 2072 runs in that position, which beats everyone including Shane Warne and his 2005 runs.  His average of 42.28 is handsomely superior to anyone else who has played at least 20 innings in that position.

So what do we do with this marvel of the lower order? We move him to the middle order. No. 6. Where he has an average of 18.25. That puts him a long, long way down the list of no. 6s. If he is going to move up high on the list of successful no. 6s he is going to have to push that average up. If he doubles it, he’ll get into the top 40. But to get to the top, he is going to have to leapfrog such names as Inzamam-ul-Haq, Jeremy Coney, Garfield Sobers and Shivnarine Chanderpaul, currently topping the list at 65.73.

Though the weather is shite here in Wellington, it looks like it could be a cracker of a day in Napier. So we can now all get excited about the deciding test. And if we are to believe the pre-test reports, a result is far more likely than in previous years in Napier.

New Zealand of course are coming into this test from a 141-run loss. Which is quite discouraging compared the 32-run margin in the first test.

I don’t think it is quite as bad as that though. I went to the last day of the Basin test, knowing that a loss was inevitable, but hoping for a fourth-innings total that wasn’t embarrassing. I went in hoping audaciously that we might get 300. I had to quickly lower my expectations when Fulton and Elliot went early,  now merely hoping that we got the highest innings total of the test. I then lowered my expectations again when Taylor and McCullum fell close together, hoping now that we wouldn’t get both of the test’s two lowest innings. So I was pleasantly surprised with the final total of 263.

In the final analysis, we at least held our own in 3 of the 4 innings. We dismissed Pakistan fairly cheaply twice and got a decent 4th innings total. It was just that 2nd innings where things crapped out.

It wasn’t really the New Zealand batsmen’s fault. They were hit by the steamroller of fate. You cannot have Virender Sehwag scoring 293 off 254 balls without someone else somewhere copping it. The laws of crickarma are cruel in that way.