South African stodges, and batting with the tail

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:

Scoring at a crawl
There used to be a time when Test matches meant slow, attritional cricket, where scoring at two runs an over was acceptable; where it wasn't unusual for batsmen to play out maiden over after maiden over; where occupation of the crease was considered more important than run-scoring. Then, the Australians introduced their brand of Test cricket in the 1990s, and what seemed the norm before that period seems utterly out of place now. Which is why, when a team adopts that go-slow approach today, it immediately stands out, because it's so rare these days. A glaring example of that was the Guyana Test, when South Africa used that approach - quite successfully, though - to save the match.

Skittled out in less than 67 overs in their first innings, the South Africans needed to bat out five sessions to save the match, and while the manner in which they achieved it wouldn't have brought the crowds flocking to the ground, it was, as far as South Africa are concerned, a job well done. They batted out 161 overs for 269, a niggardly scoring rate of 1.67, but a tremendous improvement on their fourth-day effort, when they took stonewalling to an extreme, making 85 from 63 overs. Kallis was the stodger-in-chief, making a single run off 43 balls. Since September 2001 (when we began recording ball-by-ball data for every international match), South Africa's score of 81 after 60 overs is the lowest score by any team at that stage of their innings.

Since their return to international cricket, South Africa had for long been recognised as the second-best team after Australia, but the approaches of the two teams has always been vastly different - with South Africa, the safety-first tactic has been the dominant one. The Guyana match wasn't a one-off for South Africa either - as the table below shows, two of the slowest Test innings since 1990 belong to them (min. qual: 75 overs in the innings). Against Australia in 1993-94, South Africa were faced with another last-day situation, when they needed 321 in a little more than a day - they batted 106 overs, and were bowled out for 129. The bowling figures of the Australian spinners tell the story: Shane Warne - 30.5-15-31-4; Tim May - 32-20-26-2.

However, the distinction of playing the slowest innings of all time (among all innings which lasted at least 50 overs) goes to New Zealand, who crawled their way to 69 for 6 from an excruciating 90 overs against Pakistan at the Dacca Stadium to draw the game. At the end of that innings, the only bowler who had more runs than overs bowled against his name was Fazal Mahmood, whose six overs went for a shocking 12 runs.

Shepherding the tail
VVS Laxman's batting in India's first innings of the Bangalore Test came in for plenty of scrutiny. It wasn't because he failed - he remained unbeaten on 79 - but because of the unusual manner in which he batted with the tail. A top-order batsman is expected to shepherd the lower order, take more strike and score most of the runs, but Laxman was content to expose the tail, and made no effort to farm the strike and dominate - he made only 49 of the 106 runs that India's last five wickets added.

How has Laxman fared when he has batted with the tail? Not too badly, suggest the numbers. Since September 2001, Laxman has scored 2523 runs, of which 806 have been added when batting with batsmen at No. 7 or lower. Laxman's 806 converts into nearly 54% of the team runs scored during this period. That's a much higher contribution than what Shivnarine Chanderpaul and Hashan Tillakaratne have managed, but doesn't compare very well with Brian Lara, who scores nearly 60% of the total runs when batting with the lower order.

Laxman's numbers aren't very different from Steve Waugh's, whose contribution is around 55%, but Waugh's stats exclude the runs made with the No. 7 of the Australian team, for the simple reason that Adam Gilchrist bats in that position. With Gilchrist, Waugh contributes only 38% of the runs (227 out of 601). Gilchrist himself hasn't been as dominant with the tail (batsmen at No. 8 and lower) as you'd expect, with a percentage of only 53. Of the 530 runs he's added with Shane Warne, Gilchrist has only made 253, while Warne has hit up 266. The table below shows how some of the modern-day batsmen stack up.

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S Rajesh is assistant editor of Cricinfo. For some of the data, he was helped by Arun Gopalakrishnan, the operations manager in Cricinfo's Chennai office.