Does life still begin at 40?

An interesting article on KingCricket relating to batting averages got me to thinking – what does consitute a good / great batting average in this era of Test cricket?  Traditonally, a batting average of 40 or more has been held to denote a very good player (statistically speaking), while an average of 50 is reserved for those elite few “greats”.  But there is a feeling that in this modern era the figures don’t follow that rule, and that batting averages are now inflated.

I decided to do some research using the Cricinfo Statsguru tools to see how many batsmen average over 50 during a given period, with a qualifier of 2,000 runs, starting from 1950.

These are the results, by decade:

So, in this decade so far, 19 players have scored 2,000 runs at an average of 50 or more.  But if we look at the qualifications spread over players entire careers, only 34 players have achieved the feat, 16 of whom appear on the list for this decade.  It seems clear that batting has become far easier in the last decade, and whilst there are more tests played now than ever, it should be noted that of the seven players to play in less than 50 tests, only two are from the modern era – Pietersen and Hussey.

How does the quality of test bowling have an effect on this?  Here is a similar study for bowlers, with qualifications of 50 wickets at an average of 25 or less:

This shows a downward trend for the current decade despite, or perhaps because of, the increase in test cricket – that age-old battle between quantity and quality rearing its head once again. Looking at the same qualifications, but for a players entire career, there have been 61 instances in test history of bowlers taking 50+ wickets at an average of better than 25. Of these, only 5 (Shane Bond, Shabbir Ahmed, Dale Steyn, Mohammad Asif and Stuart Clark) began their careers in this 2000s. Two others (Muttiah Muralitharan and Shaun Pollock) have had a substantial part of their careers in the current decade.

With all of this taken into consideration, how does the average of a modern day player compare with his historical counterpart? One way of gaining an impression of this is to look at how each player performs above and beyond the average for their generation. For example, Andrew Strauss has a test average of 42.71 at the time of writing. The average wicket in matches in which Strauss has played cost 34.01, so we could say that Strauss is worth 8.70 runs above the average. See the table below for some comparisons:

This shows, albeit in a fairly arbitrary way, a comparison between some of the main English performers down the years. For example, for Andrew Strauss to have scored the same percentage of the current teams runs as Graham Gooch did he would need an average of 49.50.  Of course, these figures can be influenced by the relative strengths of the teams in which these players appeared – the current team averages far more now than it did in the 1980s or ’90s – or the opposition they played against.

Gooch had the pleasure of starting his career against Lillee and Thomson, and battled the likes of Marshall, Holding, Hadlee, Kapil Dev, Alderman and so on.  Strauss has faced good bowling (Warne, McGrath etc), but there are far more average bowlers on the list.

I think this shows quite clearly that the mark of a really good test player now should be considered to be 45 and not 40, which would put the current crop of England batsmen outside of that bracket (Pietersen excepted).