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Australian selectors are going against history and maths by selecting Marnus Labuschagne and Marcus Stoinis for the national Test team.
By the time you read this the second Test against Sri Lanka may well be underway – Marnus may have scored another 50 runs or even a ton and Marcus may have done enough on debut to be pencilled in for the Ashes.
If so, some of you may have a good laugh reading what I have to say and think I’ve got mud on my face. If you do, you’ll have missed the point.
The point is that numbers in cricket are very stubborn things that reflect deep underlying patterns in how players perform over time. In picking Labuschagne and Stoinis for Test cricket the selectors are defying what the numbers tell us about cricket performance over the last century. Who knows, they may be proved right – nothing is impossible.
In theory you could sit the proverbial monkey down at the typewriter and he could bang out a Shakespearean play, but they are attempting to achieve the extremely improbable.
A lot of cricket fans were perplexed by these selections, mainly because there seemed to be more qualified players in terms of performance or because the search for that elusive all-rounder is nonsense.
Many were moved to ask: Aren’t their respective first class batting averages – around 33 – just a bit too far below the normal standard?
So I wanted to find out whether we’re missing something here. Have any of the greats or even a few of the solid but not stellar Test batsmen made their Test debut with a first-class average of 33 or lower?
In pursuit of this Holy Grail we cranked up the Cray computer at Nerdsville Central and dissected the stats for Aussie batsmen over the last 100 years – essentially since World War I. Stats from the 1920s and 1930s are pretty much the same as those of today in terms of the kinds of scores and records regarded as being very good.
On the other hand, the pitches before WWI were much dodgier. Australia’s two greatest batsmen of the period, Victor Trumper and Clem Hill, averaged only 39 in Tests. I can’t see any huge differences in conditions sufficient to say things are much harder today than 50 or 100 years ago – there might be more varied surfaces and bowlers to face around the world today, but that is counteracted by the advantage of bigger bats, smaller grounds, helmets and playing a lower percentage of games against weaker opposition.
(Ryan Pierse/Getty Images)
What bar to set for a successful Test batting career? Most would agree that an average over 50 is great; 40 to 50 is good or very, very good; and in the high 30s is solid but presumably inconsistent. But to cater for a very wide definition of success we kept the bar reasonably low – a Test average of more than 35 achieved over a minimum of ten Tests or three years. We then worked out what was the first class average of the batsman at the time of his Test debut.
The results paint a very clear picture. Of the 64 Australian batsmen making their Test and first-class debuts since 1918 who averaged over 35 across their career only two made their debuts with first-class debuts under 35 and only one with an average of 33 or lower: Keith Stackpole.
Keith Stackpole, however, didn’t even debut in the top six. Averaging only 31.9, but with some claims as a part-time spinner, Stackpole actually batted at No.8 on debut in 1966 in a late middle order that included two other batsmen-cum-spinners or vice versa in Tom Veivers and Ian Chappell. Stacky went on to become a pugnacious opening batsman with a couple of really good series in the early 1970s and finished with a solid if not stellar average of 37 over eight years with seven tons.
The other batsmen debuting with a first-class average below 35 was, curiously, Kim Hughes on 34.6, a player renowned for flare and some great innings for Australia. Even so, despite a few great innings for Australia, Hughes’s Test average finished on a somewhat disappointing 37.
The observant among you will point out that this exercise is not a randomly based trial of how batsmen averaging 33 or fewer fare in Test cricket. Most of the 33-and-belows were not given a chance, given the selectors’ general wisdom of favouring higher averages over lower ones, and usually having players with much better records demanding to be selected.
We ran out of grease for the Cray computer crankshaft so couldn’t go through the myriad of batsmen who averaged less than 35 to see whether was a strong sprinkling of low averages on debut among the poorer performers. Among the few we sampled there was a decent sprinkling of very promising players prior who didn’t fulfil that promise: Phil Hughes (55.6 first-class pre-debut, 32.7 Test average), David Hookes (52.2 first-class pre-debut, 34.4 average) and Greg Blewett (45.1 first-class pre-debut, 34 average). If you suggest that some of these players were successful enough in their own way, fair enough, but it only supports the argument that a higher first-class performance prior to debut is more likely to result in success.
Among the successful batsmen with pre-debut averages under 40 there are a few surprises. They’re some of our greatest-ever batsmen – Greg Chappell (38), Allan Border (37), Michael Clarke (38) and Adam Gilchrist (39). But these could be explained in different ways. Chappell and Clarke faced more seamer-friendly pitches in county cricket stints compared to contemporaries confined to the Sheffield Shield and Border arrived a fraction early due to the World Series Cricket exodus.
The successful batsmen with the best records on debut are as follows, shown along with their final Test averages: Ponsford (96/48), Woodfull (75/46), Rick McCosker (72/40), Bradman (71/100), Bob Cowper (68/47), Hayden (63/51), Norm O’Neill (62/46), David Warner (62/48), Steve Smith (56/64) and Mark Waugh (56/42).
Apart from a couple like Bradman and Smith and a few like Chappell, Border and Clarke noted above, the pattern for the majority of successful batsmen was to end up with a Test average close to or a few points below their pre-debut first-class average. You might be interested to know the company Joe Burns keeps in terms of a pre-debut average of 42, for example, is Steve Waugh, Colin McDonald, Jack Ryder, Andrew Symonds, Colin McDonald and Ross Edwards. A case for patience rather than panicky axings as happened in 2016 and 2018?
Of course a higher first-class average does not guarantee success in Tests, but it is a lot better predictor of the probability of success than a lower one. There is a big difference between an average in the high 30s and one in the low 30s. It shouldn’t be a big surprise that Mitchell Marsh debuted with a first-class average of 29 and has finished, for the time being at least, on 25.
The reasons for these underlying patterns are because cricket scores are ultimately about probability and chance. We like to create stories about individual scores – Travis Head ‘battled hard’ for 81 or Joe Burns ‘failed’ with a mere 15.
(Jono Searle – CA/Cricket Australia/Getty Images)
But what shapes scores and averages and the frequency of big scores is a batsman’s underlying ‘fatal error rate’ that sooner or later comes back to bite them as well as the natural strike rates of bowlers they come up against and the times they get the unplayable ball. Think of all the plays and misses, the balls in the air and the near-strangles down the leg side that accompany many successful innings. There is a great degree of chance that combines with players’ techniques, skill, temperament and shot selection to determine individual scores. It’s only in the long run that luck and chance tend to even out and the underlying quality shows in overall averages.
So if Labuschagne or Stoinis do well in Canberra, I will be concerned, but not because it in any way disproves my little rant about numbers. A sample of one proves very little and doing well against this Sri Lankan attack proves even less. But if these two, great blokes they may be, end up in the Ashes squad, I will feel our chances of success in the medium and long-term are diminished compared to having players like Burns, Patterson or Maxwell with first-class averages over 40.
The current selection panel and coach appear to be on a different wavelength when it comes to numbers. These are apparently boring things not to be given much heed compared to feel-good factors about a player’s personality. And they have gone into a completely different astral plane in picking Stoinis on the basis of T20 form – if you think it worked with Warner a few years back, it was his pre-debut first-class average of 62 that was the real clincher.
The Stoinis selection might best be summed up by the following dialogue: “Hey Usain, you’ve been getting some great times in the sprints – we reckon you’ve got potential at the longer distances and we’re going to enter you in the marathon. I know your marathon times are pretty crap, but Warnie reckons you’ve got something about you and Justin Langer says you’re an upstanding fine young Jamaican.
“In any case, the Kenyans and Ugandans aren’t running in this one, so you might do okay. Then you’ll be on the plane for the Boston Marathon and who knows?”
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