Peak-33
By Andy Zaltzman
How good was Ian Botham? Overall he averaged 28.40 with the ball, 33.54 with the bat. In the first 25 Tests of his 102-Test career, those figures are 18.52 and 40.48; in the final 25, 42.00 bowling, 23.45 batting. Overall-Botham was very good. Late-slump-Botham, scuttled by injury and time, did not merit selection. Peak-Botham was one of the greatest Test cricketers of all time. Peak-Waqar took 19 five-fors in his first 31 Tests; Increasing-Back-Trouble-Waqar took only three more in his final 56 games.
Cricket needs a measure of how good a player was in his best years. There are, evidently, greater priorities on this often-malfunctioning planet, and in this often-malfunctioning sport, but the career average, at best, needs considerable prodding to reveal its truths, and, at worst, is wilfully misleading. I therefore unveil: Peak-33 - a player's numbers in the best 33-Test phase of their careers.
Peak-33 is based on the 33 matches in which batsmen scored most runs and bowlers took most wickets, rather than the 33 in which they returned the best average.
I could have chosen another mathematically convenient number: Peak-50, for example, the length of the high plateau period of Donald Bradman's Test career; in other words, his entire career excluding his debut (18 and 1), and his final-Test duck. I could have chosen Peak-25, the number of Tests in which SF Barnes bowled a significant number of overs during his legendary 189-wickets-at-16 England career. While no one has come close to Barnes' career average since then - an average itself skewed by a deluge of late-career wickets against a relatively underpowered South Africa - Imran Khan's Peak-25 (from 1981 to 1986, excluding two Tests in Australia in which he did not bowl due to injury) produced 154 wickets at 14.85. Or I could have chosen Peak-200, to appeal to the Tendulkar fans.
I chose Peak-33, however, for the following reasons:
1. It is long enough to require prolonged consistency, even in the modern age of hyper-hectic golden-goose-squeezing schedules.
2. It is short enough to encompass the careers of far more of the pre-war titans of cricket than Peak-50.
3. It sounds better.
4. It could be the sequel to Catch-22.
5. It is the length of the Test career of naughty, naughty Salman Butt, who, with an average of 30.46, does not emerge well from the statistic.
6. It is the atomic number of arsenic. (Thank you, Wikipedia.)
7. It is the number of vertebrae in the normal human spine (coccyx included). (Ditto.)
8. It was the average number of different mystery balls announced by Shane Warne before an Ashes series. If I remember correctly.
9. It is the number of tracer bullets fired by Ravi Shastri in his special commentary research laboratory, in order to ascertain the average speed of a tracer bullet, against which to compare the speed of cricket balls........
01. Don Bradman (1928) = 102.87
02. Viv Richards (1976) = 72.56
03. Rahul Dravid (2002) = 72.37
04. Steve Waugh (1993) = 71.90
05. Mahela Jaywardene (2006) = 71.42
06. AB de Villiers (2010) = 71.31
07. Walter Hammond (1928) = 71.04
08. Garry Sobers (1957) = 71.04
09. Sachin Tendulkar (1997) = 70.19
10. Jacques Kallis (2003) = 70.16
01. Imran Khan (1980) = 171 at 15.90
02. Muttiah Muralithran (2003) = 250 at 17.32
03. Johnny Briggs (1884) = 118 at 17.75
04. Malcolm Marshall (1984) = 196 at 17.65
05. Jim Laker (1951) = 146 at 17.73
06. Richard Hadlee (1982) = 196 at 18.47
07. Curtly Ambrose (1990) = 164 at 18.84
08. Shaun Pollock (1997) = 153 at 19.31
09. Alan Davidson (1956) = 171 at 19.39
10. Waqar Younis (1990) = 191 at 19.56
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