Wow, RSA really fell in a heap. And I think even Indian fans would not suggest they have that powerful an attack.
Form is so upside down here (I guess one loss is hardly the end of the world) but it is the manner of the loss. Outside Australia and NZ it is difficult to make much of a case for other teams (although this is hardly an all time great Australian team).
The current ODI rules are such that teams batting first will win most of the time. Bat first. Score 300. While defending, take a couple quick wickets, to precipitate a batting collapse.
Starting to look that way.
12 games completed, and while there have technically been 5 wins for the team batting second, these include NZ vs Scotland, NZ vs England, Zimbabwe vs UAE and SL vs Afghanistan. And the smallest win by a side batting first has been 62 runs (SA vs Zimbabwe).
The curse of WC 2007 returns - only 3 games have been remotely close and all three involved the Associates.
That said, hat-tip to India, who look a different side from when they were rolled twice by England in the Tri-Nations, and also to West Indies for getting up off the floor to beat Pakistan.
The Poms finish with 303 for 8, which is handy enough but well down on what might have been.
Come on you Scotties, bat with level heads. You don’t need to go the tonk early to chase this down.
Scotland 54 for 3 after 12 overs. Looks like the “Bat first and score 300+” theory is holding out.
Why do people keep sending in their opponents to bat first then?
Beats me. I can only speculate that teams are not yet fully appreciating the new rules. Max of 4 fielders outside the circle. Means huge area remain unprotected. Two ball either end. No reverse swing. Or good for spin
Might as well ban all fielders except for the WK and Captain.
Batting first and scoring 300+ has always been a potent tactic.Here’s the listof all teams results when scoring 300+ when batting first. Of the 410 times it’s happened the team posting a 300+ score at the start has won 354 times (86%).
Leaving aside teams with less than 10 300+ first innings, the wins over loss ratio vary from a England’s low of 2.375 wins to one loss to a high 12.250 for South Africa. Put another way there have only ever been 51 successful chasesof over 300, regardless of fielding restrictions and that includes 60 over games.
The trick is of course, to get the 300+ runs in the first place…
Headline in my local paper:
Another World Cup upset: England win!
Will ANY of the ICC WC be available for free on US TV? So far I see ESPN is charging $100 for the tournament, and I was able to catch the tail end of Zimbabwe-Pakistan? on the Internets by clicking on a website that was full of ads and Im sure viruses. Will at least the finals be available?
Not sure if its in the best interest of growing the game in the US to charge to see it; theres been a minimal buzz about it on sports talk radio but if no one can see the games, it won’t grow here.
True, but these days even mediocre line ups get 300 easily first up. Then the opposition plays under pressure and even a couple of early wickets can and does doom the chase as the asking rate goes into orbit.
So far in this World Cup, we’ve had 8 300+ first-innings scores out of 13, and very few of them have been big teams flogging minnows. Put another way, the only sides to bat first and fail to score 300 have been Scotland, Bangladesh, UAE, England and Afghanistan.
On the subject of England, is possible to have a completely unconvincing 100-run win?
I’ve been saying all along that these days, 150 off 30, with wickets in hand, normally ends up closer to 350 than 300. England were 150 off 26, 170/0 off 30, against a county 2nd-XI bowling attack whose main threat is lack of pace. With Aus/SA/NZ/India batting you’d be breaking out the popcorn and getting ready to update the record books. England sputtered to 300, notably delaying the Powerplay until their set batsmen were out and sending in their fastest scorer (Buttler) when it was too late to matter.
It was still more than enough to beat Scotland. Against (say) Ireland or Bangladesh, it might not have been.
For the debate to be meaningful wouldn’t you also need to look at
a) a detoiorating (god! spelling) wicket?
b) when the reverse happens and a team gets a low score?
I haven’t had the chance to watch in many years (sadly) but with only 4 outside the circle at anytime has the pendulum swung too far?
Also - would it be wiser now to go all out attack? try to knock the team over early?
That seems like a non-remarkable statistic to me. You take the top 11 or 12 percent of scores and say that the team getting them usually wins. Just as un-remarkable is that if you fail to get over 170 batting first you have a 91% chance of losing.
Here are the probabilities of the team batting first winning:
If they score over 100 - 49%
If they score over 120 - 49%
If they score over 140 - 51%
If they score over 160 - 53%
If they score over 180 - 56%
If they score over 200 - 60%
If they score over 220 - 65%
If they score over 240 - 71%
If they score over 260 - 77%
If they score over 280 - 82%
If they score over 300 - 87%
If they score over 320 - 90%
Over the last 4 years since the last World Cup the team batting first has won 46% of resulted games.
Saying bat first and get 300+ ignores the fact that over 80% of the time the team batting first doesn’t get 300. In the last 4 years as many teams batting first scored less than 200. It is like saying most soccer teams win when they score the first goal in a game. And it’s true, between 64 and 72% of the time the first scorer wins. In low scoring competitions they only lose about 8% of games in which they score first. But that presupposes that the do score first just as the 300+ stat assumes, against the odds, that the team batting first can routinely score 300.
If you are looking for a close game, in the last 4 years there have been 74 matches where the team batting first scored 240 - 260 runs. They are split 37 all.
Obviously the team scoring 300 will usually win. Its a large score and the asking rate is already a run a ball, which puts immense pressure on the side chasing at the outset. But the soccer analogy is flawed. A better one would be if it was substantially easier to score one end of the ground. The team which won the toss for that end will be able to score one or even two goals and therefore even when the halves change and the reverse is true, you would not expect the other team to always get more goals, They are under pressure and tired.
In the same way. After fielding fifty overs, the side batting second has to go out and play at a run a ball from the outset, on deteriorating wicket. That is a major disadvantage. But, thats always been the case in ODI. What has changed now is that as scoring is easier, the likelyhood of facing such a task batting second has increased substantially.
Hatsoff to NZ for putting up one of the best teams, being a small country. One can see the mood is festive there, coming out n filling the stadia even in neutral games.
India has been playing better than expected, (will probably top grp B) Hats off to the Indian crowd for filling up that massive MCG stadium. 87k+ people.
WC hasnt been good for pakistan fans so far but hope they are finding the humor in the mauka ads
Well, England finally got a win. Didn’t look doing it, especially from a batting point of view - would have been great to see some acceleration at the end - but the bowling was decent.
It’s West Indies v Zimbabwe tonight, in the other group, and that’s an interesting matchup at the moment. I do think the WIndies will take it though.
don’t ask - what time period do your stats cover? Because there’s no doubt that ODI scores have gone up significantly in the last 5-10 years.
Case in point - in the first World Cup back in 1975, England scored 330 off 60 overs against India - who threw up their hands and didn’t even bother to chase. At the time 5.5/over was regarded as impregnable. These days - unless conditions favoured the bowlers - it would be regarded as par at best.
Or the case in the last World Cup where England made 230 against Sri Lanka - and apparently looked at a table like yours and thought it was a defensible total. SL blew past it by 10 wickets with 10 overs in hand.
Sure, conditions matter - on a seaming greentop in England or a spinner’s track in India, 250 may still be a good score. But in this World Cup, in Australian conditions, 300 is not a one-in-9 exceptional batting performance.
Throw out the games involving the complete minnows - Scotland, UAE and Afghanistan.
Of the 8 remaining games, the side batting first has reached 300 in 7 of them, the exception being England’s disintegration against NZ.
Of those 7 games, 6 were big wins for the batting side, the exception being Ireland’s effort against WI.
Part of this is probably deteriorating wickets. I think the other part is psychological - chasing a big target is harder than setting it. Bat first and if you hit a wobble halfway through - say 140/2 becomes 150/4 - the new batsmen can play carefully for a few overs and then accelerate. Hit the same wobble while chasing 320 and suddenly “playing carefully” means watching the asking rate shoot up to 8-9 an over, putting the batsmen under ever-increasing pressure to force things. Cue death spiral.
Methinks you doth protest too much.
Deteriorating wicket?
They are like a road from start to go. Yes, maybe a little slower and lower. Maybe not as easy to score at 6+ an over but you aren’t seeing turning, crumbling or pitches with highly variable bounce. We aren’t seeing prodigious movement off the seam or even reverse swing. These aren’t decks on which it is difficult to survive. Teams aren’t chasing well because they are relying on flat track bullies who can’t build an innings.
Scoring 100 in the last 10 overs now isn’t unusual. There have already been a couple of cases of scoring 30+ from the last 2 overs. So a viable strategy to set or chase 300 is score 200 in 40 overs and keep wickets in the shed. Since when was did that represent a daunting task in ODIs?
And as to the overwhelming fatigue that bests a team after having fielded for 50 overs? Well the bowlers who do most of the work aren’t expecting to bat for a couple of hours. Some people can run a marathon in that period. And as to the batsmen, even the fulsome Inzamam-ul-Haq didn’t go to his captain and say “Skip, I’m buggered from all that chasing … can you drop me down the order a couple of notches?”
I can’t make sense of your figures don’t ask, as unless there are a whole lot of sub-100 scores there’s no way those win percentages add up to an overall 46% for the team batting first (Which is roughly the overall % for all ODIs by the way).
The organisers have been clever truthseeker2 putting lots of the neutral group games in little grounds to make the crowds look good (seriously University Oval in Dunedin only holds 6,000, and the Nelson ground only 5,000; you’ve got bigger train stations than that I’m sure). But there’s certainly a lot of excitement down here.
I’m hoping for a close game tonight, there’ve been too many one sided contests, fun as some of them may have been.