Saturday, June 14, 2008

Clarke when the pressure's off

Homer broke down Michael Clarke's innings to see what happened when he came in with the score less than 150, and when he came in with the score greater than or equal to 150. Clarke does much better when the going's easy. But that's not a proof that Clarke is special — we would expect that batsmen do better when the bowlers have been struggling to take wickets.

So ran the numbers for all batsmen at 5 or 6. I grouped the innings into those worse than 3/150 or 4/200 (these seem reasonably equivalent), and those better. Then I took the difference of the averages. Then, to get some mileage out of this old monstrosity post of mine, I got an estimate of the probability that the "going's easy" average would arise by chance, given the "going's not easy" average, and the number of innings in each category. To give an example, Michael Clarke below gets a p-value of 0,20 — only about one in five batsmen would have such a rise in average. If there's an asterisk, then it means that the difference was too large for my estimation algorithm, and I got a senseless result.

(In The Best of the Best, Charles Davis defines a 'pressure average', which takes into account the state of the match — 4/50 in the second innings isn't a pressure situation if you've got a lead of 250 on the first innings. I can't be bothered going into this much detail.)

Note that many of the batsmen below spent much of their career higher up the order. Also note that my stats are a couple of months out of date.

Qualification of at least 10 easy innings and at least 10 not-easy innings:

worse than 3/150 better than 3/150
name inns runs avg inns runs avg diff p
SC Ganguly 77 2285 32,2 43 2069 54,4 -22,3 *
MJ Clarke 24 854 37,1 17 1037 74,1 -36,9 0,20
MV Boucher 12 342 28,5 11 599 66,6 -38,1 0,26
DR Martyn 23 619 31,0 14 787 60,5 -29,6 0,35
PH Parfitt 18 632 39,5 11 696 87,0 -47,5 0,37
DB Vengsarkar 16 439 33,8 11 581 72,6 -38,9 0,37
TE Bailey 25 653 29,7 13 543 60,3 -30,7 0,38
DI Gower 35 1262 39,4 16 926 71,2 -31,8 0,45
KR Miller 32 978 34,9 19 1000 55,6 -20,6 0,49
RP Arnold 13 215 16,5 11 331 30,1 -13,6 0,50

Clarke really has been pretty bad (well, sort of — 37,1 is below average). In terms of the raw difference, he's fifth worst (Les Ames is just off this table, difference of -37,3.).

And now those rare batsmen who do worse when the pressure's off:

worse than 3/150 better than 3/150
name inns runs avg inns runs avg diff p
A Flower 80 3761 57,9 10 310 31,0 26,9 *
CH Lloyd 78 3700 52,1 30 987 35,3 16,9 *
ND McKenzie 29 1056 40,6 16 438 27,4 13,2 0,30
A Symonds 10 389 43,2 10 233 29,1 14,1 0,44
SJ McCabe 19 830 48,8 12 397 33,1 15,7 0,46
SE Gregory 37 1015 28,2 12 205 18,6 9,6 0,56
IVA Richards 45 2051 51,3 22 852 40,6 10,7 0,77
RT Ponting 33 1604 51,7 17 570 40,7 11,0 0,81
KD Walters 60 2653 51,0 28 1113 42,8 8,2 0,87
KF Barrington 21 878 43,9 14 409 37,2 6,7 0,90

When the p-value is higher than 0,5, it means that such a 'slump' would occur in the career of one in two batsmen — pretty unremarkable. Clive Lloyd's record is probably the most remarkable of these, given the relatively large number of innings.

In the set of 83 players, 52 have better averages in easy situations, and 31 in not-easy situations.

Sorry for the no-post last weekend. The problem with devoting only one day a week to cricket stats is that if I don't get something working, then it doesn't get done for a while. I will try to return to IPL analysis next weekend.

Comments:
So i was right?

Not only about Clarke, but about Ganguly as well?
 
Well this doesn't prove that Ganguly is an alien lizard, but assuming you said about Ganguly what you did about Clarke, then yes, you were right.
 
No i said Ganguly was crap, and an alien lizard.
 
Interesting analysis, David. I'm intrigued to see that Pietersen doesn't figure in that second list: batsmen who do better under pressure.

Anyway, just discovered your blog - expect more comments from me on the other posts!
 
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