Expert Blog

ODI scoring rate changes across years

300+ scores now seem to be the order of the day in ODI cricket which has ceased to be an intriguing contest between bat and ball anymore, says our expert.

When we see scores of 280 being talked of as “below-par”, we know that there is some drastic change happening in ODI cricket. And if there is one factor which envelopes all changes, whether these are in innings scores, batsmen strike rate, bowler accuracy analysis, chasing methods, partnership strategies, middle overs handling et al, that is the RpO which is a more effective overall analysis measure than the Strike Rate which is batsman-oriented. In this article, I have analyzed the changes in RpO across the 39 years of ODI cricket, split into convenient periods. The article is current upto the disastrous abandoned ODI match between India and Sri Lanka.

Change of RpO across years

The year 2009 saw a team RpO of 5.12, the highest in history. Readers would do well to remember that this is an average, meaning, for every score of 212 or lower, there was a 300+ score. In fact it has oscillated either side of 5.00 during the last 5 years, during which the overall scoring rate has been exactly 5.00.

Another factor which has changed drastically across years is the % of innings over 300. There was a time an innings score of over 300 was rare. Then 300-chases were rare. Now these happen once in 3 or 4 matches.

% of innings over 300 across years

For information I have given below the number of innings above 300 across the years. Note the extraordinary number of such innings during 2007 and 2009.

Where are we going as far as ODI cricket is concerned? When you have 4 completed matches in the recent ODI series between India-SriLanka, in which 6 out of 8 innings were over 300, these matches cease to be true contests. There is always the ready-made argument that the spectators want high scores, and sixes and fours. That might be true, but the contests have, over the years, changed from between bat and ball to between bat and bat. Which team can bat better? That is the question. If you score 300, I will score 301, if you score 400, I will score 401. That is the challenge, a skewed one. Let the bowlers be damned. After all they are second-class citizens. 5 good overs at the end of high-scoring matches by Zaheer Khan and Nehra do not make up for 195 other batsman-dominant overs.