Salvaging the average

When you look back at the recently completed Test series between India and South Africa, the stats will state that Virender Sehwag and AB de Villiers were among the best batsmen. Sehwag scored 372 runs at 74.40 while de Villiers made 304 at an average of 76. However, a closer look will reveal that Sehwag scored 85% of his runs in one innings in Chennai, his 319 was followed by 6, 17, 8 and 22. de Villiers had scores of 44, 11, 217 not out, 25 and 7. This week we look at batsmen who scored large chunks of their series aggregates in one innings.

Ricky Ponting averaged nearly 50 during the home series against Pakistan in 1999-00, but until his final innings of the series he had an average of zero, after scoring three ducks in the first two Tests. Ponting bounced back with 197 in Perth and was the Man of the Match in Australia's innings-and-20-run victory.

Adam Gilchrist's experience during the Border-Gavaskar Trophy in 2000-01 was the reverse of Ponting's. Gilchrist began the series with a match-winning hundred in Mumbai but thereafter scored a golden pair in Kolkata and was dismissed for 1 in both innings in Chennai. He finished with 124 runs , over 98% of which had come in his first innings of the tour.

Chris Gayle had a torrid time against South Africa in 2004-05 but eventually salvaged the series after a string of failures . Gayle was dismissed for 6, 1, 0 and 5 in the first two Tests at Port-of-Spain and Bridgetown before smashing 317, his highest score, in the dead rubber in Antigua. That innings lifted his series average from 3.00 to 65.80.

If we raise the cut-off to seven innings in a series, as opposed to five, like in the table above, Martin Crowe tops the table with an aggregate of 216 runs in seven innings during the tour of West Indies in 1984-85. Crowe fell cheaply in Trinidad, scoring 3 and 2, before his 188 at Georgetown helped New Zealand draw the second Test. The teams played three ODIs before the final two Tests and the break did Crowe no good for he made only 23 runs in the last two Tests to finish the series with an average of 30.85.

Nathan Astle scored a century in the 1996 World Cup opener against England but his tournament tapered off quickly. After his 101 in Ahmedabad, Astle scored 0, 1, 2, 6 and 1 in his next five innings and finished with an average of 18.50 as New Zealand were eliminated in the quarter-finals. It wasn't the last time Astle scored heavily in just one innings: on the tour of West Indies in 2002, Astle once again scored 91 out of his series tally of 107 in Trinidad, while during the VB series in 2001-02, he scored 77% of his runs (95 out of 122) in the first match.

Ponting's average of 19.10 in the 2007-08 CB Series is his second lowest in one-day tournaments in which he's played at least five innings. Ponting scored only 191 runs in ten innings out of which 124 came in his seventh match against India at the SCG. That innings lifted Ponting's average from 10.66 to 26.85 but it slumped again after he was dismissed for 1 in each of the last three games.