Curse of the Duck
Tuesday, 30 December 2008
The curse of the duck
Cricket fans love their stats. Even the most casual follower can rattle off the batting averages of their favourite players or tell you how many wickets such-and-such a bowler took in the last test. The most passionate followers can recite each scorecard from this year's Wisden.
The recent news of the great Indian batsman Sachin Tendulkar surpassing West Indian Brian Lara's record number of test runs has given maths-loving cricket geeks another opportunity to pull out their calculators and Excel spreadsheets. I'm openly one of these nuts and did just that.
At the time of writing, Tendulkar had scored 12,027 runs across 247 innings, to overtake Lara's 11,953 from 232 innings. After a little investigation, I found that despite his outstanding average of over 54 runs per innings, Tendulkar's most common score in test cricket is ... zero!
This was quite a shock — the most prolific run-scorer in test cricket has been out for nought (a duck in cricket parlance) 14 times, well ahead of his second most common score — which incidentally is the next lowest you can get: one!
This is completely counter-intuitive, so I took this investigation further. Australian cricketer Sir Donald Bradman is universally regarded as the best batsman ever to have played the game. His average, an astounding 99.94, is so far above every other batsman in the history of the game that he is often acclaimed as not only the best cricketer ever, but the best player ever of any sport. His average is so iconic in Australia that the postcode of the ABC (the Australian version of the BBC) is 9994 in every capital city. If it wasn't for the fact that much more test cricket is played nowadays than in the early 1900s, and for World War II interrupting his career for six years, Bradman would have scored many more than the 6996 runs he did score.
So, guess what Bradman's most common score was?
That's right, zero!...
http://www.mrscienceshow.com/2008/12...ml?src=sidebar