Tristan Holme Response

[pariah]

Loses value, sure, but still a significant contribution against a major team in a win.

Kriterion's criteria is very labour intensive, and it's not easy to see everything, but that's because he's working off a stasguru based on team and all formats, but not Batsmen/Bowlers for a specific format.

For what you want Jemisi - which is all victories for that period, you can use this link for batsmen:
http://stats.espncricinfo.com/ci/engine ... pe=batting

And this one for bowlers:
http://stats.espncricinfo.com/ci/engine ... ew=innings

It's ODIs, but you can switch between formats at the top. Obviously Hami and Utseya will be way ahead of everyone in terms of winning matches for Zimbabwe, partly because they often led from the front - Hami in the top order, and Utseya opening the bowling often but appreciating the need to bowl 10 overs. If they did very well - score runs or keep it tight in the power play, that was Zimbabwe's chance. Only thing that prevents Taibu form topping that list is he as absent a lot, and retired early. Purely because of his allround abilities Elton Chigumbura is easily Zimbabwe's best player overall in matches that they have won. He is essentially Zimbabwe's MVP by quite some distance. I'll defer Vusi comments in that format to other people because apparently I'm biased.

Other small things you'll notice when you zoom in, is that in innings that Taylor did well for Zimbabwe in ODIs and they won against the "top 8", he opened the batting. Raza averages just 9 in the T20s Zimbabwe have won, while allrounder Williams averages 18 with the bat as well as 31 with the ball. It's safe to say that T20s is not a format for them. Mpofu has been a big player in ODIs Zimbabwe have won, but the allround talent of Utseya and Cremer has been understated because their batting has been impressive in Zim ODI wins. With the ball, Malcolm and Tiripano were untterly hopeless in Zim ODI wins. Malcolm and Sean scoring about 100 runs more than they conceded with the ball, while Raza scored 300 runs more than he conceded, and has by far the highest batting average - of everyone 71.30. Cometh the hour, cometh the man!

Watambwa and Blignaut were huge losses for Zimbabwe cricket.

[jaybro]

I'm sorry but I can't give Utseya any credit, he was proven to be chucking his whole career and wasn't able to correct his action.

He cheated his whole career ( with the ball ) I don't rate or give him any credit.

[Kriterion_BD]

Loses value, sure, but still a significant contribution against a major team in a win.

Only counts if you are chasing a small target.

for example, lets say ZIM are chasing 281 from 50 overs to win vs Ireland with the winner getting the last seed in the 2019 WC. ZIM finish 281-8 with 4 balls to spare and say a Hamilton on 90 off 160 not out. well that kind of innings would only have value if there was a 20-3 type collapse at the very top. otherwise its an unjustifiable innings.

[jaybro]

Loses value, sure, but still a significant contribution against a major team in a win.

Only counts if you are chasing a small target.

for example, lets say ZIM are chasing 281 from 50 overs to win vs Ireland with the winner getting the last seed in the 2019 WC. ZIM finish 281-8 with 4 balls to spare and say a Hamilton on 90 off 160 not out. well that kind of innings would only have value if there was a 20-3 type collapse at the very top. otherwise its an unjustifiable innings.

I see your point Kriterion but I think no matter the strike rate if the player ( Vusi in this case ) scored 90 odd at a strike rate of 60 odd and the side still won ( which they did ) well it should be seen as a match winning knock.

[Kriterion_BD]

I see your point Kriterion but I think no matter the strike rate if the player ( Vusi in this case ) scored 90 odd at a strike rate of 60 odd and the side still won ( which they did ) well it should be seen as a match winning knock.

To a degree.

90 off 160 equates to a run rate of 3.38. A general rule of thumb could be that for a top 6 batter, his strike rate ought to be at least 75-80% of the RRR in a ODI/T20I chase. Thus in any chase where the RRR is 4.5 or more, 90 off 160 cannot be a "match-winning" knock regardless of the actual result, unless there was a serious collapse going around that batsmen.

If you are chasing 225 off 50 overs...and one guy uses 160 balls to score 90...that leaves the remaining batsmen in the side 140 deliveries to score 135 runs, which is very nearly a run a ball. Surely thats building undue pressure on the other batsmen and shouldn't be rewarded. Might as well give it to guy batting at #7 who smacks 50 off 40 to take the side home.

Now there is a context in which such an innings could be classed as match-winning. Guy is batting at #4 and comes in with the score at 15-2 and then soon its 35-4, chasing 225. He stops the collapse with 90 off 160. Thats fine. That would be a match-winning effort, IMO.

The problem with lowering the criteria too far is that way too many guys will have far too many such "awards".

[CrimsonAvenger]

Yeah, some of those claims about slow knocks are questionable, and we can't come up with a DLS like system to take many things into account, but a significant contribution towards a win is a significant contribution, irrespective of strike rate / where he batted etc.

Anyway, the other argument of Elton, Hamilton etc. having played more and contributed less to wins when compared to Ervine / Raza is also not really looking like a good argument. If you consider % of matches where these guys have contributed to wins from the matches played, they are all pretty close even if we take your numbers as gospel.

HM: 5 out of 261 - 1.9%
EC: 5 out of 266 - 1.9%
CE: 2 out of 93 - 2.1%
SR: 3 out of 103 - 2.9%
BT: 3 out of 216 - 1.4%
GC: 3 out of 124 - 2.4%
SW: 4 out of 142 - 2.8%
CC: 4 out of 132 - 3.0%

Everyone in this list ranging between 2 to 3 with Taylor slightly less. Chamu, Raza and Williams have higher scores, their all round abilities helping. Ervine not too far away from Elton and Hamilton.

[Kriterion_BD]

Yeah, some of those claims about slow knocks are questionable, and we can't come up with a DLS like system to take many things into account, but a significant contribution towards a win is a significant contribution, irrespective of strike rate / where he batted etc.

You probably could come up with some sort of DL type formula, but that would require a lot of work and tabulating hundreds of matches over the past decade or so.

But I think its sufficient to say that a slow 50 can be match-winning if chasing/defending a small target like 200, but becomes relatively unimportant in a big chase, in most contexts.

My data isn't perfect, because I wasn't able to study the context closely. But you know what, I think I will now. Its only 26 games and will probably only take an additional 20-30 minutes. So I might as well set up hard parameters so that its not at all arbitrary or biased towards/against certain players.

So here are my parameters:

Batting

1st innings: at least 30% of innings total runs scored and at minimum of 80% of the final innings run rate or
any innings of 40+ runs at a strike rate of 120 or higher (ODIs), 30+ runs at 150 strike rate (T20I)

2nd innings: at least 30% of innings total runs scored at a minimum of 80% or the required run rate or
any innings of 40+ runs at a strike rate of 120 or higher, 30+ runs at 150 strike rate (T20I)

Bowling:

5 or more wickets and with an economy rate no more than 120% of the innings total run rate
3-4 wickets with an economy rate no more than 110% of the innings total run rate
fewer than 3 wickets economy rate must be 80% or less than innings total run rate

I think this pretty fair, and now at least we have something objective instead of the ambiguity of my initial post. I hope Jemisi will appreciate the extra effort

I think this also warrants creation of a totally new thread (I'm a stats junkie), so look out for a new thread titled "Ranking Zimbabwe's Match-Winners."

[pariah]

Loses value, sure, but still a significant contribution against a major team in a win.

Only counts if you are chasing a small target.

for example, lets say ZIM are chasing 281 from 50 overs to win vs Ireland with the winner getting the last seed in the 2019 WC. ZIM finish 281-8 with 4 balls to spare and say a Hamilton on 90 off 160 not out. well that kind of innings would only have value if there was a 20-3 type collapse at the very top. otherwise its an unjustifiable innings.

I see your point Kriterion but I think no matter the strike rate if the player ( Vusi in this case ) scored 90 odd at a strike rate of 60 odd and the side still won ( which they did ) well it should be seen as a match winning knock.

True. In fact, 22 players participated in that contests, and he was awarded Man of the Match (by the way Vusi Sibanda was also awarded man of the Series in the ODI Series against Bangladesh). Anyway if your contribution was deemed a MoM against a then Top 8 side, surely whichever way one seeks to analyse it, doesn't make sense to excluded it.

NOTE: Is there a way that some of these comments can all be moved to another thread? I'm still keen on the Tristan Holme responses being restricted to one thread(after all the owner has already separated the "request for questions" from the "responses" so I wonder how he feels now )

[foreignfield]

I've been following this discussion with interest, and I appreciate anyone who crunches the numbers for the benefit of us all. But all discusions about "match winners" leave me with an uneasy feeling. This is true for all countries, but especially for Zim with our very low win percentage. First of all: this is a team sport, and the team wins or loses. I can't remember a win where not at least 5-6 players made very significant contributions, on the contrary: if you take Vusi's match I would argue that the whole 11 played a part in that win, even BT (had he dropped Pollard we probably would have lost), Matsi (his 16 off 14 balls doesn't sound like anything, but it might well have been the difference between win and defeat) or Cremer (held a superb catch from the penultimate ball).

The argument more specific to Zim is: our wins are so few that you usually need three stars to align to be a match winner. If you play in a team that wins as much as it loses you have a pretty decent chance that a great individual effort will translate itself into a win for the team; if you play for a weak team the chances are that a lot of your best efforts will come in losing causes--and that does not make you a worse player. Just look at Andy Flower in Test cricket.

Over all I think it's all frightfully interesting without actually telling us a lot, as Crimson has pointed out:

If you consider % of matches where these guys have contributed to wins from the matches played, they are all pretty close

* and I second the motion to move this into a separate thread.

[americanzimfan]

Only counts if you are chasing a small target.

NOTE: Is there a way that some of these comments can all be moved to another thread? I'm still keen on the Tristan Holme responses being restricted to one thread(after all the owner has already separated the "request for questions" from the "responses" so I wonder how he feels now )

I'm fine, glad everyone enjoyed the Q&A with Tristan. We'll try it again after the WI Series.