Strike-rates in declared 3rd innings

When teams are looking to declare in the 3rd innings and set a target it obviously helps if you can score your runs quickly. We have already seen in the earlier post which players have good averages. Now, let’s look at players for whom we have full details of balls faced in their career with over 500 runs in declared 3rd innings in Test cricket. Kumar Sangakkara has the highest strike-rate here of 64.95, followed by Inzamam-ul-Haq (63.70) and Sanath Jayasuriya (63.69). Perhaps of more interest though is the degree to which the batsman can increase his strike-rate in this situation. So, ranking these players by the difference in their 3rd innings strike-rate and their overall strike-rates the leader is Graham Thorpe, who scored 959 runs in 16 declared 3rd innings at an average of 106.55 and a strike-rate of 58.76 compared to his career strike-rate of 45.89. The following are the top five:

Name	Decl 3rd inns	Career	Difference
GP Thorpe (Eng)	58.76	45.89	12.87
SC Ganguly (Ind)	62.43	49.68	12.75
WJ Cronje (SA)	55.94	44.50	11.44
Inzamam-ul-Haq (Pak)	63.70	54.00	9.70
Younis Khan (Pak)	63.30	53.75	9.55

At the other end of the scale Justin Langer has a strike-rate of 46.48 in declared 3rd innings, which is 7.75 lower than his career 54.23 and Herschelle Gibbs is 45.49 compared to a career 50.07. Not surprisingly, it seems that batting lower down the order when the declaration is imminent helps here rather than opening the batting when the game may still be in the balance.

If we decrease the qualification to 300 runs an interesting name appears at the top: Freshly retired Craig McMillan scored 305 runs in 5 declared 3rd innings at a strike-rate of 79.63 which is 24.71 ahead of his career strike-rate of 54.92.

And Jacques Kallis? His strike –rate is 44.08, slightly higher than his career figure of 43.13.