Hello, welcome to my second in the series of in depth analysis of twenty20 cricket which I dissect the game to understand what are the key drivers for performance and what are the trends for different areas. If you didn’t see the first blog go check it out I have linked it below:

https://theparttimeanalyst.com/2019/04/02/twenty20-data-exploratory-data-analysis-1/

The last one looked at some of the batting trends mostly strike rates across different series and venues. That can be used to adjusts a players batting strike rate for the venue / competition they are playing in. Conversely it can also be used to adjust a bowlers conceded run rate as it will be susceptible to the same effects. Today I am going to look at more bowling specifically wickets.

Above you can see the wicket strike rate per ball in the innings. The rate is pretty flat for both the first and second innings up to around ball 80 then increases exponentially. Most balls don’t end up in wickets which makes them so highly sort after. Another interesting point is the wicket rate increases towards the end of the innings, when the strike rate also increases. No surprise there the batsmen is taking more risks. What we also saw was during the power play the strike rate also increases significantly throughout but the wicket rate doesn’t change.

Overall the comparison by series of the wicket strike rate is pretty similar for all of the series. NZ Twenty20 seems to have significantly more wickets early on in an innings but that could be due to low data.

There are numerous ways which you can get out in cricket but in twenty20 cricket (probably all cricket) the most common are caught, bowled, LBW and stumped. What the graph above shows is that for caught the % of wickets is pretty flat until the end of the innings where it drops off quite sharply. Towards the end being bowled increases as the batsmen takes more risk to score as many runs possible. Stumping’s only tend to happen in the middle of the innings when the spinners are bowling and the wicket keeper is able to stand up to the stumps. What is surprising that the chances of an LBW occurring. I guess this is because as batsmen are taking more risks to score more runs they are moving their pads out the way of the ball for more of a leaver to strike the ball.

Finally the run out rate increase a lot towards the end of a innings. This is more evidence of the risk reward that is going on. With less balls left batsmen are willing to take more risks for higher rewards. An interesting analysis would be what the final scores would be if you took the same risks from ball one. That might be something to look at further in the blogs.