Duminy’s masterpiece - a few reasons why

The South African’s blistering knock against the Royal Challengers makes for some incredible analysis. Read on…

JP Duminy set the Champions League alight with an incandescent performance in the first match against Royal Challengers Bangalore. Since I watched the innings in full, I was able to appreciate many subtle nuances of the innings. I concluded, in a subjective manner, that it was one of the best chasing innings ever. Possible reasons are listed below.

- Duminy did not take time to settle down.
- He paced his innings perfectly.
- He never got stuck. Dot balls were rare.
- The required team rate never went out of hand. It was always manageable.

Then it struck me that I should be able to prove all these subjective statements in an objective, analytical manner. So I downloaded the innings data, created an Excel sheet for Duminy’s innings and went to work.

If we consider the match-related factors surrounding Duminy’s innings, the high total being chased, the entry at 14 for 2 (including Gibbs at 0), the quality of RCB bowling, the venue et al, this innings is likely to figure in the top-5 of almost any ODI/T20 innings table. Most of ODI/T20’s great innings have been first innings efforts: Richards’ 189, Jayasuriya’s 189, Saeed Anwar’s 194, Gilchrist’s 149, Dilshan’s 96 and the rest. This effort almost matches Dhoni’s 183 against Sri Lanka in 2005 and probably betters Gibbs’ 90 in T20.
 
First, the ball summary of Duminy’s innings. He scored 99 runs in 52 balls.

5 x 6s= 30
8 x 4s= 32
6 x 2s= 12
25x 1s= 25
2 x 1s=  0 (lb/b)
6 x 0s=  0

Note the very low dot balls, only around 12%. Also the number of singles taken, nearly half the number of balls played. This indicates an outstanding pacing of the innings. There were two other dot balls, for Duminy, but not for the team.

Now let us take a look at his innings scoring rate, chart below.  Barring couple of balls, his scoring rate never fell below 150. This again clearly proves that his pacing was almost perfect.


Let us now look at his ball-by-ball chart. Note that his 6 dot balls are distributed 2, 1, 1, 1 and 1. Only once did he have consecutive dot balls, that too at the beginning of the innings, book-ended between the first ball 4 and the fourth ball 6. All other dot balls were either preceded or followed by a six or four.

I have split his innings in groups of 6 balls and done a scoring rate chart of these groups. Not one of these 9 groups has a sub-100 scoring rate. That means he never had a poor scoring sequence.

Finally, the team scoring rate. The required rate at the beginning was 9.55 and Duminy walked in during the second over. Subsequently during the next 17 overs, the innings scoring rate never exceeded 10.8, which is a very difficult thing to achieve considering that the starting rate was nearly 10. In reality, in more than two-thirds of these overs, the required scoring rate was below 10.0. This shows a keen awareness of the situation and perfect pacing of the team innings, orchestrated by Duminy.