2010 on the back of an envelope

Happy New Year, everyone. I have more statistically sophisticated posts coming up (including a very belated follow-up to my last post from September), but here's something altogether more trivial: a quick end-of-year number-crunch.

I'll leave Test and ODI lists to others; what I find fascinating, at this time of year, is to zoom right out and look at all kinds of competitive cricket put together. The tables at the foot of this post show who's scored most runs and who's taken most wickets in the course of all 2010's top-class games (all first-class, List-A, and T20 cricket).

Of course, these numbers are completely imbalanced by the different mixtures of games contested by each player, so we shouldn't draw any inferences about which players are fundamentally better than others on the basis of these aggregates. Nevertheless, I always find it interesting to see who's done most heavy lifting over the course of a calendar year. Please don't ask me what this is supposed to demonstrate: if you don't think it's interesting in and of itself, then this isn't the blog post for you!

Here are some things that I noticed while compiling these tables.

* Jacques Rudolph's clear lead at the top of the run scoring chart is at least partially attributable to the sheer volume of cricket he has played: his matches encompassed a total of 209 playing days, which makes him the hardest-working cricketer of the year. (There's a lot of rubbish talked about the modern cricketer's increased workload, by the way: there were only 65 days of 1961 on which Bob Barber didn't play competitive cricket.)

* Imran Tahir bowled most balls, took most wickets, and bagged most five-fers, but he also conceded most runs. Most maidens (198 of them) were bowled by Murali Kartik.

* Jonathan Trott did something extraordinary in 2010: he scored over 3,000 runs (including more than 1,300 in white-ball cricket) without hitting a single six.

* In marked contrast, Yusuf Pathan cleared the fence 121 times in just 50 knocks, making him the most prolific six-hitter of the year, by some distance.

* James Anderson, Stuart Broad, and Steve Finn all took 99 competitive wickets in 2010. Chris Tremlett went just one better.

* Chris Gayle only reached three figures once in 50 knocks this year. Mind you, all of those figures were three.

* There is a preponderance of slow bowlers amongst the most prolific wicket-takers of the year. What is particularly interesting about this is that, overall, the proportion of wickets taken by spinners (a hair over 30%) is the lowest it has been at any stage in the last 100 years. This suggests that there's a pretty big gap between the best twirlers and their less distinguished counterparts, at the moment. There's room for some digging, there, but I promised this would be a superficial analysis.

* Shaun Tait bowled 94 wides at a rate of one every 12-and-a-bit balls. Monty Panesar, on the other hand, bowled 4,128 balls of which only three prompted the umpire to stretch his arms.

* Alastair Cook has now completed 251 first-class innings without ever being run out.

* My, Mohammad Yousuf's year was a stinker. His FC and List-A averages for 2010 are both lower than 20, and he failed to reach three figures in any form of the game.

* New Zealand's Jeetan Patel had as bad a time of it with the ball, picking up a total of 20 wickets at 73.20 in 28 innings. He was the only bowler to pick up 10 or more wickets in all cricket at a strike rate in excess of 100.

* When considering aggregates across all forms of the game, the outstanding all-rounder of the calendar year has to be Shakib Al Hasan, who scored 2,061 runs and took 136 wickets (with honourable mentions for James Franklin - 2,866 & 87 - and Ravi Bopara - 2,859 & 80).

* In a year in which - quite apart from his memorable exploits in the red-ball game - Hashim Amla scored 1,216 List-A runs at an average of 70.61 and a strike rate over 100, it's perhaps a bit of a surprise that no one thought to give him a go in a single T20 match.

* In a year in which he was perhaps more famous for catches he didn't take, Kamran Akmal nonetheless amassed more wicketkeeping dismissals (94ct, 18st) than anyone else. 2010's neatest wicketkeepers seem to have come from Down Under: Chris Nevin, Luke Ronchi, and Chris Hartley were the only stumpers who conceded fewer than 3 byes per 1,000 balls. Of those without gloves, David Hussey's 68 catches are several more than anyone else managed.

* Sachin Tendulkar is now the 19th-highest-scoring batsman in all top-level cricket, with just over 46 thousand runs, having passed Alvin Kallicharan, Kim Barnett, John Edrich, Colin Cowdrey, Glenn Turner, and Zaheer Abbas during the course of the year. (BTW, here's something I only noticed when researching that last sentence: Tendulkar's second innings v South Africa at Durban was his 1,000th in all competitive cricket - 440 FC + 516 ListA + 44 T20.)

* Finally, please forgive me a moment's chauvinism regarding the only team I really care about, but I'd just like to draw attention to the excellent figures achieved in 2010 by Somerset's young prospect Jos Buttler. His performances in white-ball cricket (average 40.18) were particularly exciting, especially as his strike rate (154.88) is second only to Shahid Afridi's on the worldwide list for the year (the only other batsmen exceeding 140 were also very eminent hitters, in the shapes of Pathan, Gilchrist, and Trescothick). Those of us with an eye on the West-Country's finest have very, very high hopes for him.