Too much cricket, or too much talk?

Burnout. That's the one word which is doing the rounds of cricket websites, magazines and coffee-table discussions perhaps more than even Sachin Tendulkar. The ICC's six-year Future Tours Programme which was announced a couple of days back was supposed to alleviate the problem - after all, the games which were supposed to have been played over five years were now spread over six.

However, going by the reactions to the announcement, the programme seems to have pleased no-one - for most the concern is too much cricket and too little time to recharge worn-out cells, but there's also the worry about some sides being shortchanged with far fewer Tests: New Zealand will play only 50 of them and Pakistan have a maximum of 54, while England will get either 75 or 76 (their tour to Pakistan in 2009-10 will consist of either three or four Tests), India 74 and Australia 73. As the table below shows, these three teams will be involved in far more cricket than the other seven sides. (All figures below are with the assumption that all sides play the maximum number of ODIs in their schedule, and that all Tests last five days. In reality the numbers for each team are likely to lower by around five to ten days per year.)

For all the talk about an overkill of cricket in the last few years, it's interesting to note that 2005 wasn't by any means the busiest in the calendar over the last ten years. In fact, as the table below indicates, the last six years were all busier, in terms of actual cricket days. (The calculations were done as follows: two matches happening simultaneously were counted as two separate cricket days, but a three-day Test added only three to the tally, not five.) As far back as 1999, there were 350 cricket days in the year, 32 more than the figure for 2005.

In fact, for the Indian team 2005 was a pretty light year: they only had 64 cricket days, down from 109 in 2002 and 98 as far back as 1997. The team which suffered an overdose in 2005 was Australia: they totalled 96 cricket days, which came on the back of two prior busy years too (88 and 90). Their three-year total (2003 to 2005) of 274 was way above other teams like New Zealand (176), Sri Lanka (190), Pakistan (193), and India (202). So while it looks like Australia are surely justified in their claim of too much cricket, some of the other sides might have done well to raise the alarm as much as seven to eight years ago.

The other interesting aspect is to look at the mix of Tests and ODIs for the teams. As you'd expect, England have the highest ratio of Test days to ODI days, while the team at the other end of the spectrum are, not surprisingly, Pakistan, with only 1.34 Test days per ODI, marginally lower than even Zimbabwe.

Hundreds versus five-fors
Is a five-for in a Test the equivalent of a century? A few readers have posed this query over the last couple of weeks, and here is an attempt to provide an answer. In this decade, there have been 635 hundreds scored in 321 Tests (before the start of the England-Sri Lanka series), compared to 370 five-fors. Clearly, batsmen reach the three-figure mark more often than bowlers polish off five in an innings.

But then, there are other things to consider - a team usually has seven top-order batsmen capable getting hundreds on a regular basis, while the corresponding figure for bowlers is usually only four. In an innings, any number of batsmen can, theoretically at least, reach the three-figure mark, while no more than two bowlers can achieve the five-for.

The tables below attempt to compare the two achievements, by taking only the hundreds made by the top seven batsmen, and five-fors taken by the top four bowlers in the side. The stats suggest that though in absolute terms centuries are scored more often, in terms of the ratios between the number of innings played and the frequency of the landmarks achieved, the difference between the batsmen and bowlers isn't very significant.