Off Stump

Any list that includes a mix like Gayle, Samaraweera, Duminy, North, and Prior as part of the top ten has to be an interesting (and surprising) one. At least four of these (Gayle being the exception) are not names I would have expected to see in the top ten when doing a Statsguru query on "highest away batting averages since Jul 2008 for players who played at least ten matches (excluding games involving Zimbabwe and Bangladesh)" . And yet there they all are. The other five of the top ten comprise Amla, Cook, de Villiers, Smith, and Trott and most people who follow Test cricket would have probably expected them to be on that list. Parsing that down further, a few more interesting things crop up. Gayle had one monster innings of 333 against Sri Lanka which inflated his average by more than 17 runs without which he would have been #7 on the list instead of at the top. Similarly, Thilan Samaraweera's twin double hundreds on the ill-fated tour of Pakistan in 2009 gave his ...

There are few things in this world that seem to polarise people more than statistics. Mark Twain's famous quote (from which this series takes its name as well) is probably the best example of the school of thought that derides the field and its use to explain things whereas most people of a scientific mind or training will almost always look at the statistics first. The truth as always probably lies somewhere in between. My own more simplistic view on statistics is closer to what a character in one of Rex Stout's innumerable Nero Wolfe books says, "There are two kinds of statistics, the kind you look up and the kind you make up". I was never particularly strong on the higher mathematics side (= the kind you make up) of the statistics coin but when it came to numbers in sports (especially cricket), my thirst for looking up has been like a glass with no bottom. Poring over lists and numbers and comparing players across eras (often on meaningless parameters) has cumu...