The Tale of a Tail

What follows is one of my favourite activities. Detecting patterns using statistics. :)

India's lower order fight back in the last test made me think.... is this one major thing that has changed about the Indian team, but has not really been registered in our minds? Has Ganguly's captaincy made the lower order more tenacious?

Let us look at the batting averages of Ganguly's regular bowlers.

Pathan - 19.50
Zaheer - 9.27
Nehra - 5.50
Harbhajan - 13.50
Agarkar - 14.00
Kumble - 16.55

That's an average of about 14 runs per bowler. Consider India plays 4 bowlers, this means they add on an average 56 runs per inning.

And the wicket keepers -

Patel - 32.00
Dasgupta - 28.67
Ratra - 18.11

Again, averaging this, we get about 26 runs.

So the lower order on an average scores 82 runs per innings. That is huge!

This led me to list the run difference between the scores at the sixth and the tenth wicket in an Indian innings in the recent past. Let's take 20 completed test inningss counting backwards. here are the scores. (in case of sub-50 scores, I have also indicated the team total) -

153, 110, 110, 81, 160, 18(286), 13(366), 76, 80, 36(424), 44(154), 29(99), 69, 45(121), 87, 98, 112, 50, 43(508), 72.

This averages to about 75 runs per inning!!

The Indian tail has started putting a price on it's life.