Rajesh Alert: BD opening batsmen

[al Furqaan]

S Rajesh's latest piece has me confused beyond anything i've suffered so far.

He lists the Test opening batting combos of all teams in countries known for seaming conditions (i.e Australia, New Zealand, England, and South Africa).

Not surprisingly Bangladesh are at the bottom. However, our stats are nearly as good the other 3 subcontient teams. How did that happen??? Did Rajes mess up calculating?

<table class="engineTable"><caption>Teams and opening pairs in Australia, England, New Zealand and South Africa since 2000</caption> <thead> <!-- headings for each column go in the "th" cells ---> <!-- use class="left" to left-align a cell, otherwise it gets right-aligned --> <tr class="head"> <th class="left">Teams</th> <th>No. of pairs</th> <th>Innings</th> <th>Inng per pair</th> <th>Average stand</th> </tr> </thead> <tbody> <!-- table data goes in tr/td row groups as like the following ---> <!-- use class="left" to left-align a cell, otherwise it gets right-aligned --> <tr class="data1"> <td class="left">Australia</td> <td>8</td> <td>128</td> <td>16.00</td> <td>51.26</td> </tr> <tr class="data1"> <td class="left">South Africa</td> <td>10</td> <td>107</td> <td>10.70</td> <td>47.64</td> </tr> <tr class="data1"> <td class="left">England</td> <td>9</td> <td>139</td> <td>15.44</td> <td>44.66</td> </tr> <tr class="data1"> <td class="left">West Indies</td> <td>12</td> <td>61</td> <td>5.08</td> <td>34.71</td> </tr> <tr class="data1"> <td class="left">India</td> <td>10</td> <td>44</td> <td>4.40</td> <td>31.25</td> </tr> <tr class="data1"> <td class="left">New Zealand</td> <td>21</td> <td>85</td> <td>4.05</td> <td>29.62</td> </tr> <tr class="data1"> <td class="left">Pakistan</td> <td>12</td> <td>36</td> <td>3.00</td> <td>29.08</td> </tr> <tr class="data1"> <td class="left">Bangladesh</td> <td>6</td> <td>20</td> <td>3.33</td> <td>28.65</td> </tr> <tr class="data1"> <td class="left">Sri Lanka</td> <td>10</td> <td>39</td> <td>3.90</td> <td>20.94</td> </tr> <tr class="data1"> <td class="left">Zimbabwe</td> <td>6</td> <td>18</td> <td>3.00</td> <td>13.16</td></tr></tbody></table>

[al Furqaan]

Holy cow, our stats are significantly better than SL's!!! man our middle order must be screwing up royally!

the stats are boosted by the above:

-hannan's ridiculous form in OZ series 03
-JO playing the series of his life in ENG 05
-Tamim and Junaid last month

[cricket_king]

Our openers aren't that bad, and haven't played too badly in recent times. I'm not so surprised about the results. It's always after the first wicket that our demise begins...

[Gowza]

i think comparing how many 50 and 100 run opening partnerships BD has compared to the other teams would be more telling. but BD has good talent in opening batsmen atm just that they're not quite developed fully and not that experienced yet so maybe in a few years that average opening partnerhip stat could go up.

[Tintin]

Breakup of the opening partnerships :

Junaid Siddique, Tamim Iqbal 2008-2008 3 0 183 161 61.00 1 0
Javed Omar, Nafees Iqbal 2005-2005 4 0 113 50 28.25 0 1
Al Sahariar, Javed Omar 2001-2002 6 0 111 39 18.50 0 0
Al Sahariar, Hannan Sarkar 2002-2002 2 0 85 52 42.50 0 1
Hannan Sarkar, Javed Omar 2003-2003 4 0 71 47 17.75 0 0
Junaid Siddique, S Nafees 2008-2008 1 0 10 10 10.00 0 0

And the contributions of the other wickets (innings, not outs, runs, HS, ave, 100/50)

2nd 20 0 599 108 29.95 1 4
3rd 20 0 408 66 20.40 0 2
4th 20 0 269 37 13.45 0 0
5th 20 0 271 70 13.55 0 1
6th 20 0 413 60 20.65 0 1
7th 20 0 248 29 12.40 0 0
8th 20 0 155 51 7.75 0 1
9th 20 0 333 60 16.65 0 2
10 19 0 122 21 6.42 0 0

Courtest : Cricinfo Statsguru

One thing that you will notice immediately is that the middle-order is practically non-existent. The 3-5 wickets together hang around typically for 15 overs, adding 46 runs.

[al Furqaan]

good dig, Tintin. thats what i assumed...cuz our opening stuff looks ok given that JO, TI, and ZS scored some big ones for us also hannan