Bowling average plummets

On 23 February 1992, I was at a match at SuperSport Park (then Centurion Park) in Centurion (then Verwoerdburg) between Titans (then Northern Transvaal) and Warriors (then Eastern Province). It was a low-scoring, slow-scoring encounter in which essentially nothing had happened for two and a half days. See here: https://cricketarchive.com/Archive/Scorecards/55/55526.html. Eastern Province were 52 for 1 needing 86 to win when something truly memorable occurred: Mike Haysman took a wicket. He had Philip Amm stumped by Ray Jennings. What made this memorable was not the immediate moment that it happened, but the long context behind it. Before that moment, Haysman had taken just one first-class wicket with his part-time off-spin, having conceded 525 runs. Inevitably (#londonbusses) he got another one four minutes later (Dave Callaghan caught and bowled) and his two for 19 in the innings meant that his career average tumbled to 181.33. The 525.00 average and 343.67 plummet were both world records. I was disappointed when doing the research for this post that neither remain the world record. Current Tamil Nadu leg-spinner, Murugan Ashwin has had a fairly successful T20 career, but his one first-class wicket in seven matches has cost 582 runs. The biggest plummet in a first-class career bowling average has at least remained in South Africa: Sinalo Gobeni had a moderate career for Boland between 2017 and 2021. In January 2020 he took 5-48 with his part-time off-spin against Border at East London. He had one wicket for 470 before the match, and his plummet of 383.67 to 86.33 is now the record. Haysman remains second on both lists.

But I am sure that you would rather read about performances at a higher level than ‘mundane’ first-class cricket. So, here to complement last week’s post on massive increases in batting averages is a look at massive decreases in bowling averages in Test cricket. Neither the willow-wielders nor leather-lobbers can escape basic rules of arithmetic, so it will be those with the less substantial priors (i.e. those with one wicket before the alarming average-altering event) that will produce the biggest plummets. While Laker’s match figures of 19-90 got the mention here:

Average Gill, and What Gill Average?

I am going to confine this to innings rather than match figures. Rusi Surti who was a fairly decent all-rounder played 26 Tests for India between 1960 and 1969, and he is the overall record holder in Tests. Going into the second innings of his 7^th Test, against West Indies at Kingston in 1962 his only wicket had cost 457 runs. 3-56 with his left-arm mediums brought his average down to 128.25, a plummet of 328.75. A very famous bowler is 3^rd on the any-number-of-wickets-prior list. Shane Warne had taken just one wicket for 335 before his 3-11 against Sri Lanka at the SSC, Colombo in 1992, a plummet of 248.50 and the rest is history, etc.

On to bowlers with more substantial priors. Grant Flower has the biggest plummet of those with 10 or more ‘before’ wickets: 25.13. He took 4-41 against Bangladesh at Chittagong in 2001 after being 10 wickets at 98.20 before. Carl Hooper is generally referred to as an all-rounder. He did take 114 Test wickets, but his average of 49.42 puts a bit of a dent in the ‘all-rounder’ claim. But, he is the most interesting amongst the category of Test bowling average plummeters. He is the only bowler to have had a drop in bowling average of more than 10 having previously taken 20 or more Test wickets. He took 5-40 against Pakistan at Port-of-Spain in 1993 to improve his record from 25 wickets at 68.40 to 30 at 58.33. He is also second amongst those with 50 or more prior wickets, a 5-26 giving him a 4.05 point drop from 56.20 to 52.15, which was just pipped by Intikhab Alam whose 7-52 against New Zealand in Dunedin in 1973 produced a drop of 4.07 from 47.50 to 43.43. Getting into ‘proper’ qualifications the record innings drop (‘plummet’ seems an over-statement at this level) amongst those with 100 ‘before’ wickets is, surprisingly, not Jim Laker. Laker’s 19-90 against Australia at Manchester in 1956 saw his average drop 1.64 after the first innings and a further 1.45 after the 2^nd innings which are 2^nd and 6^th on that list. Moeen Ali is the record-holder at this level with a drop of 1.79 from 41.14 to 39.35 when he took 6-53 against South Africa at Lord’s in 2017. Finally, the most ‘before’ wickets by someone who managed to decrease their bowling average by 1.00 or more is the 181 at 29.39 by Yasir Shah before he took 8-41 against New Zealand in Dubai in 2018 to reduce his average to 28.37. That’s enough numbers for now.

As an aside, Centurion Park was built in the mid 1980s in a place the called Verworedburg after the 1960s apartheid prime minister HF Verwoerd. Post-apartheid the place was thankfully renamed Centurion, making it the only place that I know of that has been named after a cricket ground. Shortly afterwards the cricket ground was inevitably renamed SuperSport Park after the sponsor, as one does.