Eclectic scores

I discovered many years ago, while perusing first Guiness Book of Records I saw, that golf has a concept of an eclectic score. This works by taking the lowest score for each player on each hole over a number of rounds and adding them up. As a simple example, if a player’s best score on each hole over the tournament is a two, then their eclectic score is 36. Let’s apply this concept to cricket. Disclaimer alert: This is a bit of fun and doesn’t really mean much.

To me, the most logical way to apply this is to take the record partnership for each wicket for a team and add them up. We could do this for a year, a ground, an opponent, even on Tuesdays in March if we felt so inclined. I am going to apply it to Test team’s all-time records. I suppose that I could take into account whether partnerships were unbroken or not, but that is unlikely to make much difference in the greater scheme of things. I present below the eclectic total for each team over their Test match history:

3257 England (3)

3199 Sri Lanka (5)

3125 Australia (1)

2986 West Indies (7)

2961 India (8)

2925 New Zealand (10)

2902 Pakistan (6)

2774 South Africa (2)

2283 Bangladesh (11)

1754 Zimbabwe (12)

1365 Afghanistan (4)

891 Ireland (9)

The number in brackets is the team ranking in percentage of matches won. The two most interesting cases are Sri Lanka, whose world records for the 2^nd wicket (576 by Sanath Jayasuriya and Roshan Mahanama v India at the Premadasa Stadium, Colombo in 1997) and 3^rd wicket (624 by Kumar Sangakkara and Mahela Jayawardene v South Africa at the SSC, Colombo in 2006) make a big difference, lifting them from 5^th in the percentage wins table to just behind England in 2^nd on the eclectic scores table, and South Africa whose eclectic scores is in 8^th place despite having the 2^nd best percentage win record. Sri Lanka are ahead of England until the notional fall of the 9^th wicket, but England’s world record 10^th wicket partnership of 198 between Joe Root and Jimmy Anderson v India at Nottingham in 2014 lifts them above Sri Lanka whose best 10^th wicket partnership is just 79 (only Bangladesh and Afghanistan do not have a higher last wicket effort).

The number of matches you have played obviously makes quite a big difference to the eclectic total, as can be seen with the four most recent Test nations well behind the others, and the last two places being occupied by Afghanistan (11 Tests to date) and Ireland (10). It makes Sri Lanka’s effort all the more impressive given that they are 8^th in the number of Tests played and way fewer than the top seven, especially England and Australia.

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