Hafeez makes the most of Roy clanger
According to Luck Index, Jason Roy's reprieve to Mohammad Hafeez cost England 31 runs and was a game changer
ESPNcricinfo stats team
04-Jun-2019
24.1 Rashid to Mohammad Hafeez, 1 run, WOULD YOU BELIEVE THIS? England have dropped a sitter. Hafeez skies one to mid-off and it looked the easiest catch in the world. Roy, however, drops it much to everyone's astonishment
England have prided themselves on their fielding, and were especially impressive with that aspect of their cricket against South Africa, but it let them down against Pakistan. The biggest error was Jason Roy's drop of Mohammad Hafeez in the 25th over, when the batsman had scored only 14 off 11. Hafeez went on to top score for Pakistan with 84, and was named Man of the Match.
According to ESPNcricinfo's Luck Index, which measures the run impact of every lucky event in a match, that drop cost England 31 runs. This calculation is done by simulating Pakistan's innings from that point, assuming that Hafeez would have been dismissed off that delivery, and the balls he played after that would have been played by other batsmen in the line-up. The difference between this simulated total and Pakistan's actual score is the impact of that event.
In this case, Hafeez scored 70 off 51 balls after the chance (including the delivery off which he was dropped). If the chance had been taken, Pakistan would have been 134 for 3 in the 25th, and the remaining batsmen might not have been able to bat as freely as they did with Hafeez going strong at one end. Hence, Luck Index calculated the impact of that event to be 31 runs. Given that the result margin was only 14 runs, Roy's clanger conceivably cost England the match (assuming all the other events in the match were unchanged).
However, England had a huge dollop of luck early in their chase too, when Joe Root was dropped by Babar Azam at slip in the sixth over. Root was then on 9 off 7, and went on to make 107 off 104, which means he scored 98 off 97 after the chance. Luck Index calculated the value of that chance to be 23, which means England would have scored 23 fewer runs had that chance been taken. The value is lower than Hafeez's drop because of a couple of reasons:
- Hafeez's higher strike rate after the drop
- England's stronger batting line-up, in terms of batsmen who were yet to bat when the drop happened. Since England had more quality batsmen to follow, the algorithm calculates that the impact of the event would have been slightly lesser
There were other fielding lapses on both sides too, but these two were the ones which had the most impact. In the end, the Roy miss turned out to be more costly than Babar's.