The next Lara?

In his first innings in international cricket, Ramnaresh Sarwan cracked an unbeaten 84, and since then he has been touted as the next big thing in West Indies batting after Brian Lara. That knock, against Pakistan, came six years ago, but in the interim the progress has been rather frustrating - some outstanding innings, showcasing his prodigious talent, have been interspersed with far too many soft dismissals and a tendency to throw away starts, ensuring a regular stream of questions doubting Sarwan's ability to ever live up to his undoubted potential.

His Test numbers surely smack of underperformance, but no one can make that accusation of his one-day stats: 3407 runs in 100 ODIs, with 25 scores of more than 50 and an average of 47, is testimony of a batsman who is a master of the game. His last two displays, along with being absolutely fantastic batting efforts, also showed an extra willingness to shoulder responsibility and see the team through. Sarwan's century in his 100th ODI made him only the seventh batsman in ODI history to achieve that feat, and it took his career average above that of a legend called Viv Richards.

In Tests, West Indies' fortunes with the bat have rested almost entirely on Lara, but in the shorter version, Sarwan has been the talisman: when he scores, West Indies usually win - his average in victories is almost 67, even more than Lara's (62); in defeats it slips down to 35. And he's even more effective when the team chases down a target, averaging a phenomenal 72 from 26 such matches.

Sarwan's problem has been Test match cricket - an average of 39 in that version does him scant justice. An earlier piece in the Numbers Game had mentioned one of the factors that is often the difference between a great batsman and ordinary one - the ability to convert starts and make them count. In Sarwan's case, what has hurt him the most is his tendency to throw it away after he has got a measure of the bowling: in 57% of the innings (59 out of 104, excluding unbeaten knocks of less than 20), he has gone past 20, but his average in those innings is only 66.53. Compare those numbers to Lara's, who has gone past 20 59% of the time, but has made it count to the tune of 85 runs per innings. If Sarwan had scored as many as Lara did each time he passed 20, his career average would have now been 50.03; now, he is among the rare breed of quality batsmen who average more in ODIs than Tests.

As it stands currently, Sarwan's Test stats aren't very dissimilar to another West Indian batsman who was always rated as a precocious talent, but who ended with very disappointing career stats. Carl Hooper had a 55% rate of settling in, but averaged only 63.40 in those innings, and finished with a career average of 36.46. Sarwan, though, is still a few days short of his 26th birthday, and if the careers of most batsmen are anything to go by, his best days are ahead of him. The next five to six years should see him blossom into West Indies' best batsman, taking over the mantle from Lara, and hopefully, ending with career stats which resemble Lara's rather than Hooper's. Anything significantly less, and he would have sold himself short.

Nailing the left-handers
Sri Lanka's top three in their current series against England have all been left-handers, and no one has exploited that more better than Matthew Hoggard. In three innings so far, Hoggard has a tally of eight wickets, five of whom are left-handers. In each of those three innings, he has managed to strike in his first three overs. That he loves to bowl at left-handers is obvious from the fact that among bowlers with at least 150 Test wickets, only two - Andrew Caddick and Makhaya Ntini - have a higher percentage of such victims.