Stuart Clark: Champion bowler in the Champions League

Tuesday, November 03, 2009

Let’s analyse the Australian bowler’s performance at the recently-concluded Champions League.

Some of the all-star player selections in the Champions League emphasized quantity against quality. How else can one explain the placing of Henriques and McKay above Nannes and Clark? From point of view of quality of wickets and bowling accuracy, these two bowlers stand way above the others, with Clark edging out Nannes comfortably. Here I am going to look at Clark’s bowling innspells* in general and three in particular. It is worth mentioning that these bowlers bowled a lot in Delhi.

Clark bowled 22.5 overs in 6 matches in the tournament, conceded 112 runs and captured 9 wickets. He had outstanding figures of a bowling average of 12.44 and RpO of 4.90. Let us not forget that there was no weak team in the tournament.

CL09-Match#2 against Cape Cobras

3   x Wkts = 0
12 x   0     = 0
6   x  1      = 6
3   x  2      = 6

The complete innspell is detailed below

Over 4:	W	0	0	1	0	0	1-0-1-1
Over 6:	1	0	0	0	2	W	2-0-4-3
Over 16:	0	1	0	2	0	W	3-0-7-3
Over 18:	1	1	0	2	0	1	4-0-12-3

The three wickets were those of Van Wyk, Dippenaar and du Preez, all genuine batsmen. There were 15 score-less deliveries and not a single boundary was scored.

CL09-Match#18 against Somerset

3   x  Wkts =  0
9   x   0     =  0
11 x   1     = 11
 1  x   4     =  4

Over 5:	0	W	0	W	1	0	1-0-1-2
Over 7:	1	1	0	1	W	r0	2-0-4-3
Over 9:	1	1	1	0	0	0	3-0-7-3
Over 17:	0	1	1	1	1	0	4-0-15-3

The three wickets were those of Kieswetter, Langer and Hildreth, all genuine batsmen. There were 12 score-less deliveries and a single boundary was scored, that too off the last ball of the innspell.

CL09-Match#23 against Trinidad & Tobago

3  x  Wkts = 0
7  x  0      =  0
9  x  1      =  9
2  x  2      =  4
2  x  4      =  8

Over 5:	1	0	4	2	1	0	1-0-8-0
Over 7:	1	0	0	0	1	1	2-0-11-0
Over 14:	W	0	2	1	1	1	3-0-16-1
Over 16:	1	4	0	W	W	3	5-0-21-3

The three wickets were those of Ramdin, Stewart and Mohammad, all competent batsmen. There were 10 score-less deliveries.

In these three innspells, Clark had a wicket every 8 balls, a dot ball component of over 50% (37 out of 71), a four every 4 overs and conceded no extras, not even a leg bye. The hallmark of a great performance is the number of times consecutive dot balls are bowled. Clark achieved this an incredible 19 times in the 12 overs of these three spells.

The other three innspells were

3-0-20-0 vs Sussex
4-0-27-0 vs Trinidad & Tobago
4-0-17-0 vs Victoria (Semi final)

One outstanding, one middling and one average innspell. One could only fault the first innspell, despite an RpO of 6.67. The second spell was in the face of the Kieran Pollard blitzkrieg. This was more than made up by the tight spell in the semi final.

In summary, four outstanding spells and two acceptable ones. On this basis, there is no doubt that Stuart Clark was one of the bowling architects of the trophy success of New South Wales and the bowler of the tournament.

Mr. Hilditch, why is Clark not in the Australian ODI team? For that matter, Nannes?


*An ‘innspell’ is the complete bowling effort of a bowler in an innings.

Duminy’s masterpiece - a few reasons why

Tuesday, October 20, 2009

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.