Fleming's appetite and Murali's new weapon

Perhaps numbers never do reveal the full story, but they tell a large part of it. Every Friday, The Numbers Game will take a look at statistics from the present and the past, busting myths and revealing hidden truths:

Fleming's batting graph on the upswing
For much of his career, Stephen Fleming the captain got a much higher rating than Stephen Fleming the batsman. Over the last 18 months, though, Fleming the batsman has - rather belatedly - come to the party, scoring not just pretty half-centuries, but converting them into substantial hundreds. Before New Zealand's tour to the West Indies last summer, Fleming had 36 scores of fifty or more from 119 innings, but had converted only three of them into centuries. In his next 16 tries, he went past the half-century mark four times, and made three of those knocks count - 130 against West Indies at Bridgetown, that monumental 274 not out against Sri Lanka at Colombo, and 192 against Pakistan at Hamilton in the first Test of the ongoing series. The only time he didn't convert a fifty into a hundred in this period was in the second innings of that Colombo Test, when he remained undefeated on 69. Clearly, here is a man keen to make up for the opportunities missed in the first part of his career.

Fleming before June 2002

Fleming since June 2002

* Excluding current Test against Pakistan at Wellington

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The hunger for hundreds
Fleming's newfound hunger for runs might be impressive, but he has a long way to go before he can be a part of the list below - the six names listed here are the only ones, among batsmen with at least ten Test hundreds, who have more centuries than fifties. Don Bradman and George Headley have an amazing ratio of two hundreds for every fifty, while among the rest of the players, Matthew Hayden has the best conversion rate.

With ten ducks and six centuries (excluding the second Test against Pakistan at Wellington), Fleming is well poised to make his way into another select band, though - batsmen with at least ten Test hundreds who have scored more ducks than centuries. Marvan Atapattu leads the list, thanks primarily to his horrendous start in Test cricket, when he failed to open his account in six of his first nine innings.

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Smooth starter
Mark Richardson had a modest match at Hamilton, but once again showed his ability to get off to a start, scoring 44 and 15. In 45 innings as an opener, Richardson has been dismissed for less than ten only nine times - that's 20% of the innings he has opened in (include his knock in the first innings at Wellington, and the figure drops further). Among all openers since 1995, that is the lowest percentage - a figure he shares with Michael Vaughan. In fact, England have four openers in the top 10, but Michael Atherton isn't one of them. As the table below shows, his innings-under-ten percent is a fairly high 31.47.

How do some of the old-time openers compare on this parameter? Sunil Gavaskar was dismissed below ten 57 times in the 203 innings he opened (28.08%), while Gordon Greenidge (53 out of 182, 29.12%), Desmond Haynes (50 out of 201, 24.87) and Geoff Boycott (47 out of 191, 24.61) all had their share of early dismissals against the new ball. Admittedly, though, those batsmen came up against top-class new-ball attacks far more often than the current crop of openers. The fact that Gavaskar ended up with a fifty-plus average speaks of his ability to convert a start as well.

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Turning it around
England's openers didn't have much starting problems in Sri Lanka, but they ran into a new, improved Muttiah Muralitharan, who unveiled a weapon to which England's batsmen had no answer. The table below suggests that batsmen the world over had, over the last year and a half, devised ways to keep Murali out. In three of his last five series (excluding a series against Bangladesh), Murali's strike-rate was well over 70. Batsmen didn't score too many against him - he still went at under two and a half per over - but against an attack which relied so much on Murali to deliver, keeping him out was most of the battle won.

Enter Murali with his new weapon, and the strike rate improved drastically. Graham Thorpe, who handled Murali fairly well the last time England toured, came off clearly second best in their personal battle, being dismissed by him five times in six innings, often because of his inability to read the one that turned back into him.

S Rajesh is assistant editor of Wisden Cricinfo.