Duck hunting

In last week's column about ducks in Test cricket, the List highlighted how Michael Hussey had gone 33 innings and 2120 runs without a zero. By sheer coincidence, he made a duck in his very next innings, nicking RP Singh to Mahendra Singh Dhoni in Perth. This week we look at which batsmen have had the best and worst luck with ducks in one-day internationals.

Four Sri Lankans and Wasim Akram make up the top five players with the most ducks in one-dayers. Sanath Jayasuriya's 29 zeroes are the highest, which isn't surprising considering he is one of only two players with more than 400 ODI caps. Akram has 28, while Muttiah Muralitharan and Chaminda Vaas have 23 and 22. Romesh Kaulwitharna is an unexpected entry at No. 3, having made 24 ducks in only 181 innings.

Kepler Wessels, on the other hand, played 105 innings - 51 for Australia and 54 for South Africa - without making a duck. His record is unlikely to be bettered anytime soon because, among current batsmen, Jacques Rudolph, who does not have a duck in 39 innings, is the closest. The distance between Wessels and second place, Yashpal Sharma, who did not make a duck in 42 matches, is 65 innings - unlike in the Test list, where the gap between AB de Villiers and Yasir Hameed is only 18.

Renowned mugs with the bat, such as Allan Donald, Gladstone Small, Alan Mullally, Ashish Nehra and Corey Collymore, populate the list of players with the highest percentage of ducks in a career. However, Mike Brearley, the former England captain, occupies second place, having scored six ducks in 24 innings, an average of one every four innings. The only other specialist batsman in the top 20 is Bangladesh's Mushfiqur Rahim, who has five ducks from 22 innings and could go on to match Brearley's record.

The closest anyone has come to beating Wessels is Kumar Dharmasena, who played 120 matches, but only 72 innings, without a duck, before scoring a zero in his 73rd innings. He made another duck in his 85th innings, against Australia in Dambulla, and ended his career with only two zeroes from 87 innings.

Vic Marks, the England bowler turned journalist, who played 34 ODIs in the 1980s, holds the record for having taken the highest number of wickets, 44, without dismissing a batsman for a duck. Marks bowled 1838 deliveries, which puts him in fourth place on the list of players who've bowled the most balls without dismissing a batsman for zero. Leading that table is Tim May, the Australia offspinner, who sent down 2504 balls in 47 matches without claiming a single duck.

Mitchell Johnson has a penchant for dismissing batsmen before they score. Twelve out of his 40 ODI wickets to date have been ducks, giving Johnson a ducks/wickets percentage of 30. And seven out of those 12 have been Indian batsmen - Irfan Pathan, Yuvraj Singh, Sachin Tendulkar, Robin Uthappa, Murali Kartik, Sourav Ganguly and Dinesh Karthik.

If Johnson can keep up his performance over a long career, he could get close to Akram, who has 110 ducks among his 502 ODI wickets. Akram is the only bowler to have taken more than 100 ducks in one-day internationals. Vaas and Waqar Younis are in second and third place with 73 and 72 respectively.