The Cairns story in numbers, and England's saviour

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:

Standing tall at the finish
In the end, it wasn't quite the dream finale that Chris Cairns and thousands of his fans would have hoped for: his team lost the game, and the defensive plod which turned out to be his last attempted stroke was completely incongruous with Cairns's approach to batting. However, Cairns's lionhearted performance with the ball ensured that he was still the dominant figure of the match for New Zealand. Unlike so many of his heroic efforts, though, this didn't turn out to be a matchwinning one.

A batsman scoring a century in his last Test isn't all that rare - indeed, 29 of them have performed this feat (excluding players who haven't retired yet), with Nasser Hussain being the newest member of the club - but it's far more unusual for a bowler to finish with a flourish: only seven bowlers have taken a ten-for in their final Test (eight, if one includes Andy Caddick, who took 10 for 215 against Australia at Sydney in 2002-03, and, though not yet retired, hasn't played a Test since). Cairns's 9 for 187 at Trent Bridge puts him in tenth position in the all-time list of best bowling figures in a farewell Test. Also, notably, no bowler has had such an impact in his last Test since Mike Procter in 1969-70 against Australia.

Numbers can never do justice to his talent, but they do provide a perspective of how Cairns's career developed, and why the tag of late bloomer is absolutely apt for him. As the table below shows, Cairns regularly underperformed in the first two-thirds of his Test career - a batting average of 27 and a bowling average of 31 suggested a reasonably good allrounder, nothing more. Put those numbers through the litmus test for an allrounder - the batting average being higher than the bowling average - and Cairns fails to make the cut.

However, the stats for the last one-third of his career show that Cairns's contribution with both bat and ball finally did some semblance of justice to his phenomenal talents. His batting average, especially, showed marked improvement, from a pedestrian 27 to 45, an average that top-order batsmen would be proud of. There were shades of another great allrounder there - Imran Khan weighed in more with the bat once he realised that he wasn't not quite the potent force he once were with the ball.

Except, in Chris Cairns's case, his potency with the ball didn't dimish. On the other hand, as his body became increasingly crocked with injuries, he became increasingly lethal with the ball as well. His last 22 Tests fetched him 88 wickets at less than 27 apiece, at a fantastic strike rate of a wicket every 48 balls - that's nearly as good as Malcolm Marshall, and better than Richard Hadlee and Glenn McGrath.

And, of course, there's the small matter of all those matches he missed due to various injuries - New Zealand played 119 Tests since Cairns's debut, of which he didn't play in 57. Extrapolate his rate of scoring runs and taking wickets, and Cairns would have ended with career stats of 6372 runs and 418 wickets, becoming the only man to achieve the 6000-run and 400-wicket double.

England's saviour rises to the occasion ... again
England may have lost one crisis-man with the retirement of Nasser Hussain, but Graham Thorpe showed - yet again - that as long as he is around, England need not worry about closing out wins. In the 90 Tests that Thorpe has played, he has been on the winning end 31 times, and in those games he's contributed eight hundreds and 21 fifties. The table below shows just how crucial Thorpe has been to his team's victories - among all of England's batsmen, only four average more than him in winning causes (min qual: 1000 runs in matches won).

Thorpe's average in victories is imposing enough, but he is even better at guiding England home in fourth-innings run-chases. In 19 such Tests (when England have won chasing a fourth-innings target), Thorpe has been there at the end 11 times, with five centuries and seven half-centuries at an average of 71.90.