Conventional wisdom is that Test pitches should become more difficult to bat on over the course of 5 days. Pakistan saved the Test in Lahore against South Africa relatively easily. There also appear to have been a number of successful high 4th innings run-chases in recent times.
So, the question is: Do modern Test pitches still deteriorate over 5 days as they presumably did in the past?
The short answer is yes. The table below gives the average runs per wicket by match day for Test matches that lasted exactly 5 days since the Second World War. Shorter games, and the few that have lasted longer than 5 days, in this period are excluded.
| Day | 1946-1979 | 1980-1999 | 2000-2007 |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 40.41 | 41.05 | 48.53 |
| 2 | 32.52 | 33.84 | 40.37 |
| 3 | 34.72 | 36.64 | 36.75 |
| 4 | 30.90 | 33.42 | 33.67 |
| 5 | 28.49 | 29.89 | 28.18 |
So, if anything modern Tests have a greater trend of runs per wicket steadily decreasing over the 5 days than in the past. Which suggests that pitches still behave as we would expect them to over the course of 5 days.
2 comments:
This probably could do with a deeper analysis. Because the first day always starts with the top order, there will tend to be a lack of lower order players represented, while on the last day of a Test, the opposite will tend to be true.
A better analysis might be to look at performances of players at each position of the batting order on each day.
I suspect that you will still see an effect, but perhaps not quite so strong.
I can see zscore's point about top order batsmen but this largely impacts on the first day. From that point on there will be a varying mix of batting order wickets. Yes, detailed ananlysis of batting order wicket per day would give a better analysis but is this needed? Surely the variance is not going to be that significant so the trend for days 2, 3 & 4 do show deterioration.
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