A common joke among England fans is that bowling all-rounder batsman James Vince looks superb for 20 or 30 runs, then inevitably gets himself dismissed before he can reach the 40-run mark. Today, I will be using statistics to determine if this is actually the case. Yes, I really am that bored at the minute.
For this comparison, I will be considering all players who have batted at least twenty innings for England at positions #1-#7 since the start of 2015 (Root, Stokes, Cook, Bairstow, Buttler, Ali, Burns, Denly, Jennings, Ballance, Malan, Pope, Hales, Stoneman, the recently-retired Bell and of course Vince himself). I will also include every batsman who averages 50 or more with a minimum of twenty innings played and who has played a Test match from the start of 2015 onwards (this means Smith, Kohli, Williamson, Labuschagne, Sangakkara, Younis Khan, Chanderpaul, de Villiers and of course the legendary Adam Voges). Finally, I'll be including Don Bradman because why the heck not.
In the first table, I'll be presenting each player, their batting average, their total number of innings batted, their no. of innings in which they scored between 0 and 19, their no. of innings in which they scored between 20 and 39 and finally, their no. of innings in which they scored 40 or more. Players are listed by batting average from highest to lowest.
| Player | Average | Innings | 0-19 | 20-39 | 40+ |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Don Bradman | 99.94 | 80 | 22 | 12 | 46 |
| Marnus Labuschagne | 63.43 | 23 | 7 | 2 | 14 |
| Steve Smith | 62.84 | 131 | 45 | 24 | 62 |
| Adam Voges | 61.87 | 31 | 13 | 7 | 11 |
| Kumar Sangakkara | 57.40 | 233 | 86 | 40 | 107 |
| Virat Kohli | 53.62 | 145 | 60 | 22 | 63 |
| Younis Khan | 52.05 | 213 | 86 | 42 | 85 |
| Shivnarine Chanderpaul | 51.37 | 280 | 108 | 52 | 120 |
| Kane Williamson | 50.99 | 140 | 57 | 21 | 62 |
| AB de Villiers | 50.66 | 191 | 69 | 37 | 85 |
| Joe Root | 47.99 | 177 | 70 | 31 | 76 |
| Alastair Cook | 45.35 | 291 | 128 | 50 | 113 |
| Ian Bell | 42.69 | 205 | 97 | 34 | 74 |
| Ollie Pope | 37.94 | 20 | 12 | 2 | 6 |
| Ben Stokes | 37.84 | 122 | 52 | 31 | 39 |
| Gary Ballance | 37.45 | 42 | 18 | 12 | 12 |
| Jonny Bairstow | 34.74 | 123 | 55 | 29 | 39 |
| Jos Buttler | 33.90 | 82 | 37 | 19 | 26 |
| Rory Burns | 32.44 | 38 | 19 | 6 | 13 |
| Joe Denly | 29.53 | 28 | 11 | 11 | 6 |
| Moeen Ali | 28.97 | 104 | 59 | 21 | 24 |
| Dawid Malan | 27.84 | 26 | 14 | 5 | 7 |
| Mark Stoneman | 27.68 | 20 | 10 | 4 | 6 |
| Alex Hales | 27.28 | 21 | 14 | 2 | 5 |
| Keaton Jennings | 25.19 | 32 | 19 | 7 | 6 |
| James Vince | 24.90 | 22 | 13 | 4 | 5 |
By coincidence, Vince is at the very bottom when it comes to batting average (I swear I didn't plan this). With Vince, the perception is that he often reaches 20 but fails to reach 40. Thus, the next table will be looking at what percentage of the time each of the above batsmen reach 20 runs in an innings, ranked from highest to lowest.
| Player | Percentage reached 20 runs |
|---|---|
| Don Bradman | 72.50 % |
| Marnus Labuschagne | 69.57 % |
| Steve Smith | 65.65 % |
| AB de Villiers | 63.87 % |
| Kumar Sangakkara | 63.09 % |
| Shivnarine Chanderpaul | 61.43 % |
| Joe Denly | 60.71 % |
| Joe Root | 60.45 % |
| Younis Khan | 59.62 % |
| Kane Williamson | 59.29 % |
| Virat Kohli | 58.62 % |
| Adam Voges | 58.06 % |
| Ben Stokes | 57.38 % |
| Gary Ballance | 57.14 % |
| Alastair Cook | 56.01 % |
| Jonny Bairstow | 55.28 % |
| Jos Buttler | 54.88 % |
| Ian Bell | 52.68 % |
| Rory Burns | 50.00 % |
| Mark Stoneman | 50.00 % |
| Dawid Malan | 46.15 % |
| Moeen Ali | 43.27 % |
| James Vince | 40.91 % |
| Keaton Jennings | 40.63 % |
| Ollie Pope | 40.00 % |
| Alex Hales | 33.33 % |
There are actually a lot of insightful conclusions you can draw from this sort of 'breaking down innings into chunks' data (see this wonderful analysis by u/insideoutovercover for an example) but we're not here for that; instead, we're here for some spicy James Vince memes. Still, aside from Vince, there are a few interesting case studies here.
Firstly, Vince actually isn't as good at reaching the 20-run mark as I thought he was. Nearly 60% of the time, he gets out before then. Small sample size, I know, but his reputation of reliably making 20s and 30s doesn't appear to be backed up by the stats.
Secondly, Ollie Pope's stats here are pretty poor and a little surprising considering that he's yet to be dismissed for a duck in his Test career. His average is a lot better than the players around him, though, so perhaps he's just good at making big scores once he does get his eye in. Also, it could simply be the case that he just hasn't played that many innings so his numbers are a little skewed.
Thirdly, out of the batsmen who average 50 or above, Smith, AB and Sangakkara rank pretty highly in terms of consistently reaching 20 runs, whereas Voges and Kohli struggle to reach that landmark relatively speaking. In Voges' case, I'm not at all surprised given how a couple of great series completely blew up his average, and in Kohli's case, he has a reputation for either going cheaply or scoring piles of runs so these stats shouldn't be particularly shocking.
Fourthly, out of the England batsmen, Dendulkar is the king of reaching 20 runs consistently (in fact, in that metric, he beats out three of the Fab Four) and Root isn't far behind. Beyond England's generational batting talent (and Joe Root), Stokes and Ballance do pretty well when it comes to reaching the 20-run mark.
Finally, this Bradman fellow seems like a decent batsman. He's got nothing on Marnus Labuschagne, though.
This is only part of the story, however. As well as his reputation for consistently reaching 20-30 runs, Vince also has a reputation for consistently getting out on 20-30 runs. Let us then create a table ranking these batsmen by how often they reach 40 runs given that they've already reached 20 runs. To do this, we just simply take the number of innings in which they've scored 20+ runs and divide that by the number of innings in which they've scored 40+ runs.
| Player | Percentage reached 40 runs after reaching 20 runs |
|---|---|
| Marnus Labuschagne | 87.50 % |
| Don Bradman | 79.31 % |
| Ollie Pope | 75.00 % |
| Kane Williamson | 74.70 % |
| Virat Kohli | 74.12 % |
| Kumar Sangakkara | 72.79 % |
| Steve Smith | 72.09 % |
| Alex Hales | 71.43 % |
| Joe Root | 71.03 % |
| Shivnarine Chanderpaul | 69.77 % |
| AB de Villiers | 69.67 % |
| Alastair Cook | 69.33 % |
| Ian Bell | 68.52 % |
| Rory Burns | 68.42 % |
| Younis Khan | 66.93 % |
| Adam Voges | 61.11 % |
| Mark Stoneman | 60.00 % |
| Dawid Malan | 58.33 % |
| Jos Buttler | 57.78 % |
| Jonny Bairstow | 57.35 % |
| Ben Stokes | 55.71 % |
| James Vince | 55.56 % |
| Moeen Ali | 53.33 % |
| Gary Ballance | 50.00 % |
| Keaton Jennings | 46.15 % |
| Joe Denly | 35.29 % |
It won't surprise anybody that for the most part, batsmen tend to find it easier to get from 20 to 40 than they do to get from 0 to 20. Kohli of course does well here, and of the England batsmen, both Pope and Hales are ridiculously better at converting 20s into 40s than they are at reaching 20 in the first place (of course, Hales was so bad at reaching 20 that his ability to push on to 40 didn't really matter). Of all the batsmen we have analysed, there are only three exceptions to this general rule:
- Stokes: He reaches 20 runs 57.38% of the time and from there, he reaches 40 runs 55.71% of the time. It's only a slight drop, but any sort of drop is unusual, at least for the batsmen analysed in this post (for all I know, this particular list of players could be the exception rather than the norm). His ability to get starts is certainly better than most recent English batsmen and his average suggests that he does a relatively good job of cashing in once he reaches 40 runs compared to other English batsmen.
- Ballance: Like Stokes but worse. He reaches the 20-run mark 57.14% of the time (nearly as often as Stokes does) but then there's just a 1-in-2 chance that he kicks on to 40. His average is about the same as Stokes', though, so he can be quite dangerous once he reaches 40. I don't know for sure why this happens, but my hypothesis is that around the 20-run mark, teams begin to figure out Ballance's glaring technical flaw, and if they haven't figured it out by the time he reaches 40, they probably aren't figuring it out any time soon.
- Denly: By far the most bizarre batsman on this list; he somehow finds it easy to reach 20 but can't seem to reach 40 to save his life. It's not just a slight difference either; he reaches 20 runs 60.71% of the time (the best out of the English batsmen) yet once he's settled, he only reaches the 40-run mark 35.29% of the time (way behind the second-worst, Keaton Jennings, at 46.15%). I...can't explain this. Seriously, I'm at a loss here. For most batsmen, they tend to struggle in the nervous nineties; for Root, it's the nervous sixties; for Denly, it's the nervous twenties and thirties.
You know who isn't on the above list? That's right: Marnus Labuschagne. In fact, he's more reliable at reaching 40 once he reaches 20 than Bradman is. Labuschagne > Bradman confirmed.
Oh, also, Vince isn't on the list either. If you were to present two scenarios to England fans (Vince reaching 20 and Vince reaching 40 given that he's already reached 20) and ask them which one is more likely, I suspect most of them would say that the former is the likelier scenario (although perhaps I just have a very skewed perception of the general opinion among fellow England fans).
As a matter of fact, Vince reaches 20 runs around 40.91% of the time while he reaches 40 runs 55.56% of the time in situations where he's already scored 20. That doesn't seem too unusual for a batsman of his rather low ability. Why, then, does he seemingly have this reputation of scoring 20-30 runs before immediately getting out? To be honest, I have no idea. Perhaps this reputation is simply something that I've conjured up in my imagination rather than it being a reputation which actually exists in the minds of England fans. Denly certainly has a reputation for scoring twenty-odd or thirty-odd before being dismissed, but in his case, the stats actually back it up.
A slightly more tongue-in-cheek one this time, but I think there's a lot of genuinely useful stuff you can find out from this sort of analysis. Anyway, I hope you guys enjoyed the read.
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