Conventional Wisdom Wisdom

In the comments to this article it is suggested that conventional wisdom says the best batsmen should be third in the order.

While baseball sabermetrics has challenged the conventional wisdom of the lineup, in cricket my haphazard studies of win expectancy suggest that in test cricket's case the conventional wisdom is absolutely spot on. The crucial wicket to defend are the second and third ones. If the first wicket goes cheaply, it's important that the second one goes for a par score. If the first two wickets go down for not-very-many, it's vital that the third wicket puts up a high score.

Once you're three down and below par, you're in real trouble.

Declaration Time?

England face a nice problem in the Lord's Test against the Australians. How many runs will make the game safe? How much time is needed to take ten Australian wickets? It was exercising the Sky commentators through most of the session after Tea, but I thought Atherton summed it up well. 'Bat through to about 40 minutes of the morning session, then declare,' he said.

At the time he made that statement, I thought England needed less time and more runs, and suggested batting through to mid-afternoon. Then, somebody made the comment that Lord's lately had proven to be a hard ground to take wickets on days 4 and 5. (Or maybe it was just day 5.) People often say such things, then you look it up and they are completely wrong.

Test             Day 4      Day 5
2004 vs NZL        9          3
2004 vs WIN        8          7
2005 vs AUS        5         n/a
2006 vs SRL        3          3
2006 vs PAK        8          4
2007 vs WIN       11          0
2007 vs IND       11          6
2008 vs NZL       10          6
2008 vs RSA        1          2

Mostly memory is a case of people remembering the last time. In 2008, England couldn't buy a wicket at Lord's against South Africa for two days. In fact, looking over the past six years, taking ten wickets starting sometime on the fourth day looks pretty attractive. With a full day on Monday, I think England should calculate on getting 4 wickets. So how much time will it take to break the first six partnerships on Sunday?

I think Atherton has it about right. Declare sometime during the morning session, and go for it.

Something in the Air

Here's a query for Statsguru at Cricinfo.com: how many times has a team given up six hundred runs in a match's second innings and drawn the match? The answer is eight.

The interesting point is that three of those draws have occurred this year, and two of those matches involved England.

During the first day, I commented to my erstwhile associate Mr Austin, that it seemed as if England had finally figured out something I learned almost as soon as I started using sabermetric methods to look at cricket: to build a winning team, first build a platform to avoid defeat. Or, in other words, make sure your tail is not full of cheap wickets, even if your attack suffers.

I just wonder if this reflects the Strauss-Flower combination. It's not the sort of attitude the Hussain-Fletcher era would have endorsed. They played to win, on Australia's terms; and never did against Australia. Let's see how things develop in this series.

Nightwatchmen Discussion

Here is a post about using nightwatchmen by a real sabermetrician, Phil Birnbaum.

I haven't read it properly yet myself, but I link to it in case you've missed it.