STBR Stats

With no stat suggestions arising from last week's match, we today take a request from the email - from Owen Dive, of Canberra, Australia

Mr Dive points out that a large number of "runs" in indoor cricket are scored without the batsmen actually having to run - for instance, by hitting the ball into the net, or having the bowler deliver wides and no-balls. He therefore wants to know which batsmen score the most actual 'runs' - by physically running from one crease to the other.

This week's question comes from Mr Andrew Ragg, from Canberra, Australia. Perhaps due to his own infamous reputation as a bowler of wides, he asks:

What is the greatest percentage of runs a team has scored from extras?

To start with, let me point out that doing percentages of runs in indoor cricket can be tricky - and sometimes meaningless - when negative scores (or small positive scores) come in to play. For example, if we just jump straight in with a spreadsheet of stats, and look at the highest and lowest percentages, we get these two winners:

Popped Collars have struggled for players this season (as we saw a few weeks back). For this reason, we have also struggled to collect a full team worth of match fees each week. While we are behind on payment, we receive no competition points each week, no matter the outcome of the game. All we achieve by winning matches and skins is preventing other teams from scoring points.

Now imagine we live in an alternate reality, where the Popped Collars had no trouble getting together a full team and paying a full team worth of match fees each week this season. In the alternate universe, the ladder for this season's competition would look rather different. Well, actually, there'd only be one difference: would be well up the ladder, rather than miles last. This week's stat is simply:

Where would we be on the ladder if we had kept up to date paying our match fees each week?


The current competition ladder is here, and at the time of writing this, appears to be up to date (the "last modified" date on the page is yesterday). Here is a snapshot of the ladder as it currently stands:

Continuing from last week, where we looked at the glory of bowling third-balls, it's now time to look at the unfortunate business of having to face them while in bat.

This is pretty much going to be a copy and paste of last week with the batting stats and commentary in place of the bowling ones.

While looking through the "third dot ball" stats, I found that there have been 6 occasions during Popped Collars history where there have been too many dot ball in a row. Obviously just times where the umpire has not noticed that he should call 'third ball' and has let an extra one go.

Four of them were split across consecutive overs, allowing 3 consecutive balls to be bowled with no score off them. The other two were 'double-score' balls which were not counted as two dots, as the rules of the Weston Competition said they should be.

Four of them were while we were batting - two of them while we were bowling. So we've actually got the better of it.

After seeing Brad send down consecutive dot balls and have the next one smacked to the back net, Andy proposed that was something that seemed to happen quite often.

This week's blog will check out all sorts of details relating to "third ball". And after I made a point of saying the 'consecutive balls' stats that I did last time, it turned out that this was even more tedious. But whatever...

Back with one of my previous indoor cricket teams, this was one of my favourite stats. So I'm going to round out the week of posts with it.

When the team (or player) was in poor batting form, we would pull out this particular stat, and challenge people to try to set new records. It mostly worked quite well, as long as people were actually interested in attempting to achieve it. I always say about indoor batting: "If you don't get out while you're batting, you will make a decent score", and that's what this stat is about.

How long a streak of balls-faced can a player accumulate in between losing wickets?

The streak counts across innings and matches - so, for example, if you manage to play half a dozen consecutive innings without losing a wicket, you could rack up 100 or so deliveries faced.