Cairns in numbers

At the time of his retiring, Chris Cairns was 50 runs short of becoming only the third player to score 5000 runs and take 200 wickets in one-day cricket

George Binoy

23-Jan-2006

Chris Cairns ended his ODI career on the doorstep of an elite club. © Getty Images

At the time of his retiring, Chris Cairns was 50 runs short of becoming only the third player to score 5000 runs and take 200 wickets in one-day internationals, the other two being Jacques Kallis and Sanath Jayasuriya. The mindset that didn't urge him to play the extra one or two games to achieve this record is precisely why a statistical view of Cairns's career cannot fully capture his impact as a player.

A penchant for big-hitting evidently ran in the Cairns family. His father Lance's ODI strike rate of 104.88 is the third-highest and Chris's tally of 240 sixes (in both Tests and ODIs ) is behind Shahid Afridi's 254 and Jayasuriya's 245.

Cairns's averages with bat and ball, which hovered either side of 30, are ordinary figures but put the two together and throw in a strike rate of 84.26 with a six-hitting frequency better than Viv Richards and you begin to get the picture of what Cairns brought to the game. He's one of seven players to have taken 200 wickets and scored more than 3000 runs in ODIs.

Allrounders with more than 3000 runs and 200 wickets
Player	Matches	Runs/avg	Wickets/avg
Sanath Jayasuriya	347	10333/31.99	268/36.77
Jacques Kallis	229	7955/44.19	201/32.08
Chris Cairns	215	4950/29.46	201/32.81
Chris Harris	250	4379/29	203/37.50
Abdul Razzaq	201	3949/29.92	223/29.84
Kapil Dev	225	3782/23.79	253/27.45
Wasim Akram	356	3717/16.52	502/23.53

A player of his ability has a crucial influence on the outcome of the game. In matches won by New Zealand, Cairns averages 36.22 with the bat and just 24.91 with the ball . Three of his four centuries have resulted in New Zealand wins, the most significant being the hundred in the Champions Trophy final against India in Nairobi.

Cairns played 215 ODIs for New Zealand but missed out on a whopping 104 matches (32.6%) during his career mostly because of injuries that never allowed a consistent display of his outstanding talent.

His batting record against Trans-Tasman rivals Australia is one that Cairns would have dearly liked to improve. He averages 24.68 and has only six half-centuries in the 42 games played against Australia. England also have got the better of Cairns. In 18 games against England, Cairns has scored just 290 runs at 18.12 with two fifties.

Most fast bowlers have struggled with the heat and flat pitches in the subcontinent and Cairns was no exception. In 38 games in India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka, he took just 19 wickets. In India he averaged 46.41, in Pakistan 71.83, and in Sri Lanka Cairns managed just one wicket from nine games.

Chris Cairns New Zealand

George Binoy is editorial assistant of Cricinfo