For the love of numbers

From Kevin Sawers, Australia
Cricket statistics are fantastic. I know that they are not always the most accurate indicator of the worth of someone to a team but then again, Don Bradman's number of 99.94 tells plenty of the story don't they?

One statistical area that has been neglected is the area of fielding. Not completely ignored of course. Accurate records are kept about catches and stumpings. For wicket keepers there are also amounts of byes recorded too but as far as I can tell that is pretty much it. How good would it be if there were statistics of say how many catches a player had dropped? In addition it would be an interesting statistic if it could somehow be recorded how much runs a person cost a team after a drop. What good is it after all if someone averages 50 plus but drops catches so regularly that they cost a team more then they average each game? Wouldn't it be terrific to have statistics available that showed how many runs a fielder had saved per innings too?

Someone like Andrew Symonds, Michael Clarke and Ricky Ponting would be players who I think would rack up some pretty significant numbers in terms of runs saved per innings. Obviously the problem with this is that the amount saved per innings would have a degree of subjectivity. All the same, it would be intriguing to know who were the players who saved the most runs per innings. Symonds might average 40 with the bat in ODI but if he averaged 5 runs an innings saved per game, that would boost his value to a team even more!