Cricket Punt
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Blog
The draft came and went on Monday, but one of the names that wasn’t picked up was Gloucestershire captain, Jack Taylor. Taylor the niche finisher? Taylor operates in an interesting niche in the in the t20 world – the finishers, but more specifically, the seam finisher. This is a highly specialised role, batting at 5 or 6, where players are expected to get their team over the line chasing, or if setting go at at least 10+ runs per over in the last 3-5 overs of the innings. A lot of franchises double this role up with a 5th / 6th choice bowler and fill the team with these in the 5-8 slots. The modern team generally now has 4 specialist bats, a batting keeper, 4 specialist bowlers and 2-3 all rounders who either fill the 5th bowling option or combine as a 6th bowler for specific match ups. Examples of these players include Ben Cutting, Carlos Brathwaite, Keiron Pollard. Therefore, for Taylor to be noticed and stick his head above the parapet as a non bowling finisher you need to be elite to get drafted.
Using Balls per boundary as a Blast metric for all rounders in t20 cricket
The Hundred Draft - taking a closer look at the 2020 Blast Season and who may or may not get drafted. Batsman statistics in the 2020 Blast Season
My initial research on the Hundred batsman came up with a few names like Hain, Bell-Drummond and Luke Hollman. One name that kept coming out though was Ian Cockbain, so I am going to take a closer look at his numbers over the last three seasons to see what we can learn about this player.
I was thinking about what makes a great bowler in t20 cricket. Some of the obvious metrics are bowling economy, strike rate, balls per wicket. There’s been work done on True Strike Rates that give each ball an expected outcome and how you perform over time against the average gives you a true performance level. This is fantastic but not everyone has access to an all singing, all dancing models. In the article about batting, I picked out three key metrics than can be used to assess players which I believe are important. So it makes some sense that if bowlers can restrict these then they must be fairly valuable. Here are the three metrics but in reverse for the bowlers, a) the best 1st 10 balls strike rate, b) best strike rate to set batsman who have faced over 18 balls and c) the lowest six percentage. Obviously these figures are not perfect, if someone played all their games at the MCG their six % would be artificially low or if they were at Taunton artificially high but if we inclined we could adjust for that and give each ground a six rating and then apply it to the player. I won’t be doing that today but I could make that data privately available should anyone be particularly interested. Furthermore the data set is small, so analysing one season like this will give rise to a recency bias. You might get taken down by Colin Munro on one day and all of a sudden your statistics look bad. Anyway, let's take a look at the worst offenders in the t20 blast last season 1. Strike rate to batsman facing their 1st 10 balls
