In cricket, there is always a bias towards judging a bowler by how many wickets he takes.
Ryan Harris is great because he’s only the third bowler to take 100 wickets after debuting past 30. Mitchell Johnson is ‘chief destroyer’ because he’s taken 50-odd wickets in the space of eight Tests. Graeme Swann retired because he lost his wicket taking power.
Wickets are important, and being the bloke that actually bowls the ball that gets one of the other mob out is cause for celebration.
But heaping all of the praise on the ‘wicket taker’ doesn’t give enough regard to the complexity of how wickets come about.
A lot goes into it, unless you’re Ryan Harris bowling to Alastair Cook at the WACA – although you could argue the beating the English were subjected to throughout the series contributed to cloudy mental state. That, or it was one of the best pills delivered in recent memory.
But how can we quantify what goes ‘into’ bringing about a wicket? Unfortunately, unlike American sports, the powers that be in cricket don’t have an open source culture when it comes to data and statistics.
Sure, you can jump on Cricinfo and check out the ball-by-ball commentary, or use private providers like the excellent CSW Database kept by Ric Finlay.
But these are all very high level numbers that don’t really give you a sense of what’s happening in the game. But that’s another column for another day.
As a compromise, I’ve looked at the ball-by-all commentary from the recent ‘Super Ashes’ series (the 10 Tests spanning the Northern and Southern editions of the Ashes in 2013) and looked at which bowlers have been bowling in the overs immediately preceding a wicket falling, as well as the wicket over itself, in an attempt to see which slingers are more likely to bowl around a wicket.
For this analysis, I’ve considered the five overs bowled before a wicket is taken, and the over where the wicket is taken, as the ‘red zone’. The theory being if a players bowls a greater share of his overs immediately before a wicket is taken, he is having an impact on the wicket-taking process.
I’ve also removed players who bowled less than 30 overs – over a larger sample of games you could include genuine part-timers, but with just 10 games it’s a little rough.
Now it’s important to flag that these numbers are probably of little predictive value – they don’t go to the reasons why wickets happen to fall around the time these particular players are bowling. But they do at least tell us the what, which is useful in getting an understanding of the impact at this point in time.
So, who had the most impact during the Super Ashes? First, for Australia:
| Bowler | Share of overs bowled | Share of “red zone” overs bowled | Difference |
| Mitchell Johnson | 11.20% | 15.90% | 4.70% |
| Nathan Lyon | 17.30% | 20.20% | 2.90% |
| Ryan Harris | 19.30% | 20.40% | 1.10% |
| Pattinson | 5.40% | 6.00% | 0.60% |
| Jackson Bird | 2.50% | 2.90% | 0.40% |
| Shane Watson | 7.70% | 7.30% | -0.40% |
| Peter Siddle | 20.40% | 19.90% | -0.50% |
| Steve Smith | 2.50% | 1.90% | -0.60% |
| Mitchell Starc | 7.00% | 5.40% | -1.60% |
| Ashton Agar | 4.90% | 2.80% | -2.20% |
Did we need any more proof to say Mitchell Johnson is an ‘impactful’ bowler? Probably not. But this really confirms it.
Johnson bowled 11.2 percent of Australia’s overs throughout these 10 Tests – much lower than Lyon, Harris and Siddle, but that’s because he came in during the Australian summer.
But Johnson bowled 15.9 per cent of the overs in our ‘red zone’ period. This equals a 4.7 percentage point difference between his likelihood of bowling generally versus bowling specifically in the period immediately before a wicket is taken.
This is clearly the strongest of all bowlers, and a sign of the impact Johnson had during the Ashes period.
The figures also show the value of Nathan Lyon.
While he didn’t take an incredible number of wickets (28 at a tick over 30), Lyon’s value comes in his ability to hold up an end.
During the Ashes Tests he played, Lyon conceded just 2.92 runs per over, the lowest of Australia’s bowling attack. This skill has likely led to his strong ‘red zone’ rating of 2.9 percentage points.
I’d hazard that Harris has a similar effect – his nagging line and length bowling limits scoring rates. He may be banged up, but the numbers show may have a strong impact on Australia’s ability to take wickets.
He’s pretty good at taking wickets in isolation too, having logged 46 wickets over his nine Tests.
For Pattinson, it’s more likely he’s got a bit more of a ‘Johnson’ effect – intimidatory bowling, building pressure and taking wickets.
For Siddle, Bird and Watson, the figures are too close to being ‘neutral’ for there to be any effect to consider. They don’t have a great positive impact on wicket taking, but at the same time they don’t have a real negative impact, either.
In Siddle’s case, its perhaps his noticeable drop off in pace that has caused him to become an ‘average’ bowler. He’s certainly in the top handful of pacemen in Australia, and I bet every Shield side in the country would take him if they had the chance.
On the negative side are some relative newcomers, and a part-time leg spinner. Fairly safe to assume these three bowlers have the occasional loosener, which may reduce the likelihood of building pressure.
However, the positive for Australia is that none of its frontline bowlers – except perhaps Starc in the Test he played – had a significantly negative ‘red zone’ rating.
With that in mind, lets take a quick look at England.
| Bowler | Share of overs bowled | Share of “red zone” overs bowled | Difference |
| Tim Bresnan | 9.20% | 11.10% | 1.90% |
| Stuart Broad | 20.90% | 22.20% | 1.30% |
| Joe Root | 2.90% | 3.00% | 0.10% |
| Chris Tremlett | 2.20% | 1.60% | -0.60% |
| Ben Stokes | 7.00% | 6.30% | -0.80% |
| James Anderson | 23.90% | 22.60% | -1.30% |
| Graeme Swann | 23.50% | 21.00% | -2.50% |
| Monty Panesar | 4.30% | 1.60% | -2.70% |
The two biggest points to come out of these figures are Swann and Anderson. Long lauded as the spearhead and ‘stopper’ of the England attack, these two Brits were less likely to be bowling in the ‘red zone’ – a sign of their lack of impact during the series.
The numbers also show Bresnan had a strong impact in those Tests he played in. Maybe he should have gotten more opportunity?
Look, these numbers aren’t really scientific. They aren’t predictive. They’re not really that valuable. But with what we’ve got, they provide a sense of which bowers have an impact on wicket taking beyond taking a scalp themselves.
Intuitively, they make sense: Johnson and Lyon have a high likelihood of bowling around the time a wicket is taken – Swann and Anderson were less likely to have been bowling.
Lies, damned lies, and statistics? Possibly. But I think we’re on to something here.
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