First-class cricket reached the milestone of 50 000 matches this weekend, according to the Association of Cricket Statisticians and Historians list of first-class matches. The first match on this list was played in 1801. The Pura Cup match between Western Australia and New South Wales in Perth is the match that has the honour of being number 50 000 chronologically, starting a few hours after the South Australia v Victoria match on Sunday 14 October.
By comparison, Major League Baseball, in case you are interested, has seen about 193 000 games since 1871.
The 10 000th first-class match was played in 1922, 20 000 was reached in 1953, 30 000 in 1974 and 40 000 in 1992.
The 50 000 matches have taken place over about 160 000 days and, at a very rough guess, 750 000 hours.
The County Championship accounts for 20 402 (over 40%) of the matches.
Around 5 000 (10%) have been played in London alone, 2 709 of them at Lord’s.
There have been approximately 39 million runs scored and 1.5 million wickets taken in the equivalent of about 13.5 million 6-ball overs in first-class cricket to date.
Over 3 500 batsmen have been out hit wicket (14 by Arthur Milton alone, and 6 by Gavin Cowley in just 87 dismissals) and nearly 180 000 lbw. How many appeals there have been is beyond reasonable estimation.
And over 10 000 catches have been taken by subs.
Welcome
Hello.
Welcome to the Bat and Ball Brimborion.
This is a blog about numbers (mostly).
Cricket statistics (mostly).
But they could be any numbers.
Or anything else that I may feel like rambling on about.
Whatever may interest me at the time.
Enjoy.
And, in case you are wondering:
Brimborion – n. Something useless or nonsensical. From ‘The Superior Person’s Second Book of Words’ by Peter Bowler (not the first-class cricketer).
Andrew
Welcome to the Bat and Ball Brimborion.
This is a blog about numbers (mostly).
Cricket statistics (mostly).
But they could be any numbers.
Or anything else that I may feel like rambling on about.
Whatever may interest me at the time.
Enjoy.
And, in case you are wondering:
Brimborion – n. Something useless or nonsensical. From ‘The Superior Person’s Second Book of Words’ by Peter Bowler (not the first-class cricketer).
Andrew
Monday, October 15, 2007
Milestone for first-class cricket
Posted at 3:33 PM
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3 comments:
Wow, what an amazing stat, my 31 years of scoring County Championship, must research how many of those 50,000 I attended.
Great blog, will visit often.
Vic
During Inzamam's last test stats on TV showed that he hasn't been run out so much in his career as most would believe would be the case for such an infamous runner between the wickets. He must have surely run out a few partners though. Is there any kind of statistic that would record run outs involved in rather than being run out yourself? If this do exist, my money is on Inzi.
In Tests, Inzi was run out 6 times and his batting partners were run out 10 times. Although this is not in balance, it is fairly typical of important batsmen, especially middle-order batsmen who bat with tailenders fairly often.
Among batsmen batting 100 times or more, Inzi's ratio of 16 run outs in 198 innings (8.1%) ranks 32nd out of 132 players. 1st is Ridley Jacobs (14.7%) and least run out prone is Kapil Dev (0 runs outs and 3 partners in 184 innings)
It is interesting to look at those prone to running out their partners rather than being run out themselves.
Statistically, the "leader" here is Jimmy Adams, who was never run out, but saw nine partners run out in Tests. However, I think the true master of this stat is Steve Waugh, run out only four times, but running out 23 partners.
At the other end of the scale, Glenn McGrath was involved in seven run outs, and was the bunny every time.
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