India’s best tailenders

Ishant Sharma’s heroics and his maiden Test fifty reminded us of the importance of having tailenders who can score some runs. Or, failing that, at least stay around long enough for other batsmen to score some more runs. Ishant was perhaps more of the second type.

We have a quick look at the best performers at 8-11 in the three formats.

For Tests and ODIsĀ  a cutoff of 20 innings is used. For T20Is it is 10 innings.

Test batting averages at 8-11:

Indian tailenders

RA Jadeja’s average is now above Kapil Dev’s. Remember that both of them and a few others like Nadkarni scored centuries up to No 7 as well.

Kapil, Ashwin and Harbhajan have two centuries here. Others with centuries are Kirmani, IK Pathan, Kumble and Agarkar.

Here Agarkar has the lowest average by a century-maker and Ishant the lowest by a fifty-maker.

The lowest average here is by Maninder Singh, followed by Chandrashekhar and Doshi which most would have guessed.

In ODIs, we have:

Indian Tailenders (ODI)

The highest averages are by Pathan and Chetan Sharma. Sharma has scored a century batting lower.

Pathan and Agarkar are the only ones here with 2 fifties. The lowest average by a fifty-scorer is by Praveen Kumar.

The lowest average is by Sreesanth, followed by Ishant Sharma and Nehra.

For T20Is, no one has 20 innings so we take the cutoff of 10 innings instead.

Indian tailenders - T20I

Ashwin and Harbhajan are the only ones who qualify here. Neither has scored a fifty.