The Test debutants of 2020

These are the players who made their Test debut in 2020:

This list is in chronological order of debut.

No really outstanding performances. We look through the good performances:

Batting: 40 or more in an innings:

PJ Malan (SA) 84 v E

KT Kasuza (Z) 63 v SL

Hasuranga de Silva (SL) 59 v SA

J da Silva (WI) 57 v NZ

GD Philips (NZ) 52 v A

S Gill (I) 45 v A

KA Jamieson (NZ) 44 v I

80 or more in the match:

PJ Malan (SA) 89 v E

S Gill (I) 80 v A

While Malan has the best innings and match scores, he is not in the current Test team of SA. Similarly Philips is not in the current NZ team. Gill is likely to make further progress, as he did with 91 in the decisive Test at Brisbane.

Bowling: 4 or more wickets in an innings:

The only fiver is by BE Hendricks, who is not in the current SA team. Jamieson with 4-39 can be said to be the bowling find for NZ, as he went on to make a 10-for.

8 or more wickets in the match:

None. The best are

6-100 by L Sipamla (SA) v SL

6-175 by BE Hendricks (SA) v E

5-77 by Mohammed Siraj (I) v A

Fielding: Most dismissals in an innings:

2 by J da Silva (WI) and by Mohammed Siraj (I)

Most dismissals in a match:

Again, 2 by J da Silva (WI) and by Mohammed Siraj (I).

da Silva is a keeper and Siraj is not.

Oddly, no one made a stumping on debut this year.

Best all-round performances:

KA Jamieson (44, 4-39) and 1 catch

Hasuranga de Silva (59, 4-171) and 1 catch.

Clearly Jamieson had the more impressive all-round debut.

Review of Tests in 2020-Part 2

Hope you have read Part 1.

We continue with individual performances

Fielding – 8 or more dismissals:

Led by Buttler and Watling. The most catches by a fielder are 14 by Root and Stokes.

From India, Pant has 12 catches as a keeper.

The most stumpings is 3 by Dickwella.

Innings dismissals – 4 and above:

5 dismissals by 4 players, including a non-keeper in Stokes. He also gets a share in the world record of 5 catches held by several players. Pant has 4 catches in an innings.

Match dismissals – 5 and above:

Dominated by de Kock and Watling. Among non-keepers, Stokes and Pope have 6 catches each.

All-round match performances (50 and 5wi):

Broad achieved the rare double of a fifty and 10wm. The next best performance was by Sikander Raza with 100+ runs and 8 wickets.

In Part 3, we will look at the performances of debutants in 2020.

T20Is in 2020: Part 2 (Individuals)

Hope that you have read Part 1:

https://abn397.wordpress.com/2021/01/08/t20is-in-2020-part-1-teams/

While 36 teams played T20Is in 2020, it is more meaningful to look at performances in a more restricted set. So we consider only matches between the 14 teams who have played ODIs in the past.

Batting: Most runs (175 and above):

Led by Hafeez and Rahul.

There is only one century (GD Philips). 5 players made 4 scores of 50+, including KL Rahul.

Highest individual scores (70 and above):

Spare a thought for Malan and Hafeez who scored 99*, besides others with 95. The highest for India is 85 by Kohli.

There is not enough data to make meaningful analysis of averages and strike rates.

Bowling: Most wickets (8 or more):

The fast-improving Ngidi leads with 17 wickets. India’s SN Thakur is in third place.

5wi has been made once by 4 players. 4wi has been made once by 8 players.

Best innings bowling: Includes all instances of 4wi

The best performances are by the lesser-known Haroon Arshad and LH Ferguson. Bumrah (3-12)

has the best figures for India.

Best fielding (5 or more dismissals):

This is headed by TL Seifert of NZ. with 11 dismissals. Southee (9) has the best by a non-keeper. Rizwan (3) has the most stumpings. Kohli and Rahul both made 5 dismissals, the best for India.

Best innings fielding: (3 or more dismissals)

No one from India even made 3 dismissals here.

All-round performance: (Minimum 20 runs and 2 wickets in a match)

Of these 8 instances, two were by Thakur and 2 by Agar. The best seems to be Haroon Arshad’s 27/5-16, followed by Agar’s 20*/5-24.

T20Is in 2020-Part 1 (Teams)

Covid prevented cricket for much of the year, though some T20Is were played. Here we have a summary of all T20Is in the calendar year 2020.

A total of 36 teams played T20Is during 2020. But would a table like this have much meaning? Many of the teams listed here have cricketing standards much lower than the “regular” teams who have been playing Tests and ODIs over the decades. (And the vast majority of the players in these teams are those who grew up elsewhere, mainly from South Asia with a few from England and Australia).

The Playfair Cricket Annual recognizes the distortion which the “big bang” has caused, and have listed records “only for matches where at least one of the teams has played ODIs at some time.”

I am going a step further and am listing records only for matches between teams which have played ODIs.

There are 24 such teams after you remove the ICC World XI, Asia XI, Africa XI and the vanished East Africa. We then find that only 14 of them managed to play T20Is during this period.

We then repeat the above table for these 14 teams:

This seems to show that India is the best-performing team here, ahead of England and Pakistan.

Next I will take up individual performances in matches between these 14 teams in 2020.

https://abn397.wordpress.com/2021/01/09/t20is-in-2020-part-2-individuals/

Statistics of ODIs of 2020

The number of matches in all formats got reduced due to “unforeseen circumstances”. However, we still have some aggregates which are of some utility even if averages and strike rates are not meaningful.

We start with the ICC rankings at the end of the year:

Which has England, India, New Zealand and Australia as the top 4 teams.

A simple comparison of W-L ratios gives this:

Not really meaningful as the top 3 teams here (Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Pakistan) have played too few matches. Then we have Oman (!) followed by SA and NZ which still doesn’t make much sense.

A summary of individual performances follows.

Batting-most runs (250 and above):

That’s more like it. Finch leads by a large margin over his team-mate SPD Smith. Rahul and Kohli are 5th and 6th.

And Labuschagne, the Test find of 2019 is 3rd here.

The most 100s are 3 by SPD Smith. The most 50+ scores are 7 by Finch followed by 5 by Smith and Kohli.

Highest innings (100 and more):

All the centuries are listed here:

Unusually, the only scores above 150 are from Bangladesh. The highest from India is 119 by RG Sharma.

Bowling – most wickets (8 and above):

Zampa with 27 wickets is far ahead of the second-placed AS Joseph.

The most 4wi hauls is 3 by AS Joseph

No one has more than one 5wi.

M Shami has the most wickets for India (12).

Best innings bowling (All instances of 4wi):

The fast-rising S Lamichane of Nepal has the best figures of 6-16, which came against USA, another one of the newcomers. The only other 6-wicket haul was by the relatively inexperienced L Ngidi

India’s best is quite far down, being Shami’s 4-63.

Most dismissals (5 or more):

The most dismissals are 15 by Carey (Aus) and Hope (WI). The most by a non-keeper is 10 by Starc.

Rahul had the most stumpings (2).

For India, Kohli has 5 dismissals.

Most innings dismissals (4 and more):

The highest is 5 by Hope, and three others have 4 each. The best for India is 3 by Rahul on two occasions.

Several non-keepers have taken 3 catches in an innings.

All-round match performances (30 runs and 3wi):

The best would seem to be the two instances by Aqib Ilyas of Oman, followed by JJ Smit of Namibia.