The Friday Column
Nugget's summer woes, plus Lord's trouble with fourths, Ramsay's herring and Captain Magnet
U Umar

Perhaps numbers never do reveal the full story, but they tell a large part of it. Every Friday, The Numbers Game will take a look at statistics from the present and the past, busting myths and revealing hidden truths. The Numbers Game - the ultimate companion to your own stat-watching.

Nugget's summer woes
After a golden return with the bat during the Autumn 04 season in which he finished above his brother on the batting averages, Craig "Nugget" Meng has found form hard to come by this time around. Lying a paltry third on the averages and with a strike rate well below 1.00 (the mark that separates reasonable players from the absolute chaff), it's time to ask the question - What's wrong with Nugget? We believe a clue to the answer lies in an analysis of Nugget's shot breakdown, which is as follows.

Here we can see the percentage of balls hit to the various scoring zones in each of Nugget's last two seasons. In his golden season, Nugget was hitting fully 24% of the balls he faced to the back half (i.e. 24% of his shots accrued 3 or more); this season, his back half percentage has nearly halved to just 13%. Worryingly, most of this discrepancy can be accounted for by an increase in dismissals - in particular, Nugget has been caught 8 times in just 9 matches this season, typically from shots aimed towards the back half. This compares with just 4 times caught in 14 matches during the Autumn 04 season. One contributing factor to this sorry state of affairs may be related to the retirement of his long time companion, Pete May. 

Here we can see that although partnerships with his elder brother yield a higher partnership aggregate on average, Nugget personally does best when batting with, you guessed it, "The Iceman" Pete May. This figure in fact goes up to 1.86 when considering matches from Autumn 04 onwards. Nugget may well be advised to go into bat for May the next time Ramsay is at home preserving his average, instead of attempting to further his own leadership aspirations.

Lord's trouble with fourths
Another player who could be forgiven for having one eye on his own spot in the team is the explosive "Lords" Lord. With a batting strike rate plumetting to a career-low 0.59 (that's a Crane-esque 0.42 for the season so far), the enigmatic allrounder must be wondering where it's going wrong. He can wonder no more.

Lord gets tired. Unlike most players who struggle early on whilst getting their eye in, Lord collapses at the end. In the fourth over of his partnerships over the last two seasons, Lord's strike rate (i.e. runs/ball) is negative. Worse than Mullen's career strike rate. Put it this way, if it weren't for fourth overs, Lord would be striking at an acceptable 0.76 since the start of Autumn 04, good enough for 6th spot, and way ahead of Colvin and Parr. For the record, the worst single over for any player is Mullen's efforts in first overs (a strike rate of -0.80).

Ramsay's herring and Captain Magnet
Everyone connected with the Gods is aware of the stats-watching tendencies of occasional fill-in Scott "Street" Ramsay. One of the great urban myths associated with KRG stats (perpetuated mercilessly by Ramsay himself) has to do with runouts achieved whilst bowling. Specifically, it goes something like this - if said form of dismissal counted towards a bowler's analysis, Ramsay would be on top of  the "overall" statistical category, i.e. he would be the Gods' alpha-allrounder. Obviously with the number of Mengs in the side being greater than zero this is a ridiculous assertion, but we here at The Numbers Game decided to investigate his claims anyway. 

As can be seen from the table, Ramsay is in fact the third worst bowler in terms of enticing batsman to commit running suicide. On a related topic, Colvin has long campaigned (with little joy) for extras to be included in a batsman's individual total. Although his reasoning - that "low nets [not counting extras - Ed] lead to low morale" - sounds as if he's just completed a Level 3 certificate in "Advanced Captaincy - Assorted Topics", we think the following table shows this canny operator's motives are a little closer to home.

Colvin is undeniably an extras-magnet, but why? One suggestion has it that opposition sides are deliberately bowling Colvin extras to stymie his belligerent power-hitting game, which has seen him hit the backnet (5s and 7s) an incredible six times in just 38 games. This compares favourably with known sluggers Mullen (once in 16 games) and Crane (three times in 15 games). By comparison, to pluck a name at random, S Meng has gone downtown 62 times in 43 games. 

 

U "Umpy" Umar is a well-known umpire with SSS. For these answers he made use both of his own copious notes on KRG matches, as well as information supplied by the next-generation stats-watching software KURU2-Toadfish.