England's 1% chance of winning the World Cup

Plus, mind-boggling stats from the Australia-India series

15-Jan-2015

Under pressure Alastair Cook was again in charge for the seventh ODI, Sri Lanka v England, 7th ODI, Colombo, December 16, 2014

I am delighted to announce that, after a four-month sabbatical, which involved watching a harrowingly, unhealthily small amount of cricket, The Confectionery Stall is back. The World Cup is just one month away, and Test cricket has been locked in its cage for a few months to think about its career goals and ambitions for the future, in an age when a top-level cricket match has increasingly become an evening's entertainment rather than a week's obsession.

The T20 juggernaut jaunts along with characteristic pizzazz, but the stage will soon be clear for the 50-over game to state its case for continued relevance. The knockout stages will be gripping; the month of shuffle to reach them may test the patience of the uncommitted. The quarter-finalists in 2011 could have been predicted at least 20 years before the tournament started (although England selflessly tried to enliven the tournament's early stages with their barking-mad campaign of dramatic wins, startling losses and a pulsating tie with India in Bangalore). Four more years of T20 entrenchment could result in a public less tolerant of the elongated preamble of a predictable group stage.

England have played oddly little cricket since September - no Tests, and a one-day series in completely different conditions to the ones they will face in the World Cup - but played it sufficiently poorly to lose a captain.

Thus, their plans for the World Cup are going exactly according to plan. Having realised that they had no prospect of winning it by conventional means, they have devoted themselves to concocting the perfect plot for a Hollywood sports movie about a team that had been written off, with seemingly no chance of success, defying the odds and surging from the depths of hopelessness to clinch a dramatic triumph.

The narrative has been perfectly structured - the team in disarray, with its captain, for whom the star player was sacrificed and in whom four years of planning for the tournament was invested, now himself despatched, and supplanted by an out-of-form replacement whose own struggles indirectly contributed to the sacking of his predecessor, and who must now coax the best from a team of largely untested greenhorns plus a couple of stalwarts returning from injury. The team will have to defy not only horrible recent form but also two decades of gloriously unalloyed uselessness at World Cups. All overseen by an opinion-splitting coach still unproven in his second incarnation. In the country where the team suffered one of its greatest ever humiliations a little over a year previously. With the shadow of the aforementioned sacked player still pootling around in the background. MGM must be frothing at the mouth with excitement, ready to cast Daniel Craig as Man of the Tournament James Tredwell.

The level of planning that has gone into making this fairy-tale ending so outlandish as to render it inevitable is truly astonishing, and those involved deserve considerable credit. The only potential fly in England's ointment is that, of the hundreds of similarly plotted sporting campaigns in which glory was supposed to emerge from chaos and disarray, around 99% end in failure. Not even heroic failure. Abject failure. The kind of failure you would expect to emerge from chaos and disarray.

However, England's chances of being among the 1% are, as these things go, good. The plots for such movies often take licenses with history in order to make their outcome seem even more unlikely. In England's case, they can point to the reunion of Stuart Broad and James Anderson for the first time in ODIs since they spearheaded a very-nearly-successful Champions Trophy campaign 18 months ago. They have match-winners with bat and ball (although not as many as the leading contenders do). They will be unburdened by public expectations. And, above all, they will be emboldened by the format of the tournament, which requires not the consistent performance of hardened winners but a two-phase campaign involving (1) a month of not screwing up too disastrously, followed by (2) a ten-day, three-game microstreak of form and luck. Admittedly, successfully completing phase one is not a certainty, the seven other teams in phase two will also be one hot streak away from unstoppability, and the consistent performance of hardened winners is generally a useful asset when trying to pull off a three-game microstreak of form and luck. But the point stands. England could win it.

Confectionery Stall England Prediction: Quarter-Final exit.

After the World Cup, the rest of England's 2015 stretches out like the idiotically planned festival of excessive cricket that it is - they will play 17 Tests in the nine and a half months from mid-April this year until January 2016. Miraculously, only a measly five of those matches will be against Australia (I assume whichever fool failed to book in a second Ashes series this year has been rightly fired). It is as if England are embarking on a sponsored one-nation Test marathon to preserve the primacy of the five-day game by playing so much of it that it becomes diminished and devalued - thereby reminding its distressed fans why it is so special and must be protected at all costs from the ravenous gullet of the international schedule. Whatever happens, at least 2015 will probably involve less upheaval and fewer provocative autobiographies than 2014. And hopefully it will involve a large amount of Moeen Ali batting.

And now, some stats emerging from Australia's comfortable, run-drenched series win over India, which featured a record seven centuries by captains, and suggested that India's next win outside Asia could possibly happen at some point within the next 100 years. The expansion of this site, and the cricket media in general, has made finding stats that have not already been found by others increasingly challenging. But that is a challenge I am more than willing to embrace. Albeit at some cost to my social life and mental equilibrium.

There were 44 scores of 50 or more in the four Tests. At 11 half-centuries per Test, this series broke the all-time series record for most 50-plus scores per match, previously held by the batsman-overfriendly Gooch-and-Azharuddin-inspired runfest between England and India in 1990 (32 fifties in three Tests, at 10.66 per match). Only six previous series have featured more than 44 fifties (three of which were six matches long, the other three were five-game series).

Despite losing 2-0, India averaged 37.76 runs per wicket - the highest average by any team in a series loss to the Baggy Greens, and the third highest average ever recorded by any of the 287 teams that have lost a Test series by at least two matches.

India were the first team ever to pass 400 four times in a losing series. Only twice in the previous 90 years (and five times in total) had a team posted even three 400-plus scores in a series defeat - India in their 1-0 loss in England in 1990, and Pakistan, also in England, in 2006.

The two teams' combined first-innings average of 52.9 runs per wicket is the highest in a series of at least three Tests in Australia, and the seventh-highest anywhere.

Virat Kohli became the second player to score four hundreds in a series after failing to post a single half-century in his previous series. He scored 134 runs in 10 innings in England, followed by 692 in eight in Australia. Jacques Kallis scored four centuries against West Indies in 2003-04 after failing to reach 50 in South Africa's preceding series, against Pakistan, although that was only a two-match rubber. Kallis averaged 25 in that series - the lowest by a player who went on to score four tons in his subsequent series, until Kohli smithereened the record with his spectacular megafailure-to-hypersuccess statistical somersault in England and Australia. (A full list of players with four centuries in a series is here.)

Suresh Raina became the second Indian top-order batsman to bag a pair in two Test matches. Mohinder Amarnath also did so, recording two double-zilches in the series against West Indies, in 1983-84. Raina has played four innings in the fourth Test of a series, and been dismissed four times in 46 balls, whilst scoring precisely zero runs.

Of the 51 batsmen who have batted 25 or more times in India's top six in Tests, Raina has the third-worst average.

Of the 63 batsmen who have batted 25 or more times in their country's top six in Tests this decade, Raina has the worst average (25.78), and the most ducks (8).

Of the 1225 bowlers to have sent down at least 60 overs in Test cricket, Varun Aaron has the worst economy rate (4.90), eclipsing the record figure of 4.64 held by England's Chris Cowdrey for more than 25 years.

Aaron's series economy rate of 5.64 was the worst by any bowler who has bowled at least 40 overs in a series (out of 6431 instances).

Umesh Yadav's series economy rate of 4.62 was the second-worst by the 306 visiting bowlers who have bowled 100 overs in a series in Australia. The only more expensive performance was by a promising young Indian bowler called Umesh Yadav, three years ago (4.66 per over, but with a better average). Those are, respectively, the fourth and third most expensive series (of at least 100 overs) ever bowled in Tests.

Yadav's career economy rate of 4.33 is the worst of the 610 bowlers who have bowled 300 overs or more (and third worst, behind Aaron and Bangladesh's occasional tweakster Mohammad Ashraful, of any bowler with more than 150 overs under his belt).

Mohammed Shami, at 3.80 per over, has not achieved quite such illustrious heights of lack of control, but can still claim to be the seventh most expensive bowler with more than 400 overs in Tests.

In ten Tests in 2014, India conceded nine century partnerships for the sixth to tenth wickets. The previous record for most 100 stands conceded to opponents' last five wickets in a calendar year was seven (India in 1983, in 18 Tests).

Against India in 2014, teams' top five wickets added on average 41.9 runs per dismissal. Their last five wickets then averaged a staggering 47.6 runs per dismissal. Only once has a Test nation had a statistically worse year against opposing lower orders - Bangladesh, in 2001 (56.4 runs per wicket in eight Tests) (minimum 20 lower-order partnerships in the year). In fact, in 2014, India dismissed their opponents' top order more efficiently than South Africa (43.3), Australia (47.3), Pakistan (44.2) or New Zealand (44.7). However, those four teams,collectively finished off their opponents' last five wickets for, on average, 23.3 runs per partnership.

India conceded more than 250 after the fall of the fifth wicket in five innings last year, having not done so since 2009. They conceded five stands of more than 130 for the seventh to tenth wickets in 2014, having suffered only four such partnerships in the previous 12 years.

And finally, some complete irrelevancies:

The Sydney Test provided the first ever instances of both teams' Nos. 2 and 4 all scoring first-innings centuries (Warner and Smith; Rahul and Kohli).

The first innings of the Brisbane Test provided the second instance of a team's No. 6, 7 and 8 all being dismissed in the 30s in the same innings (Rohit, Dhoni and Ashwin; Australia's middle order had done the same in the MCG Ashes Test of 1911-12).

It also provided the second instance of a left-handed No. 8 and 9 scoring half-centuries in the same innings (Johnson and Starc, who followed Harris and Vettori for New Zealand v Zimbabwe in 1997-98).

Will 2015 throw up a trio of stats as unstoppably meaningless as those? Watch this space. Please.

Coming up in The Confectionery Stall in the next few weeks: A team-by-team guide to the World Cup. If you have any specific queries about your team you would like me to answer, please tweet them to @ZaltzCricket.

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Andy Zaltzman is a stand-up comedian, a regular on BBC Radio 4, and a writer