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***Official*** New Zealand in Zimbabwe and South Africa 2015

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Dan

Hall of Fame Member
My philosophy is pretty simple: strike rate is meaningless if you're all out (before the 45th).

Forcing yourself to go at 8 an over in the first 10 is useless if you lose 4 wickets in doing so, because Anderson and Ronchi sure aren't batting out 40 overs from there very often.

If Latham can strike in the mid-80s, he'll be fine. And I imagine, as he learns his ODI game, he'll be more than capable of doing that. And tbf, most non-Baz openers who get out in the first 5 overs have rubbish strike rates at the time; their scoring is never going to be linear. Unless you're AB de Villiers, it takes time to settle in. And that's exaggerated when you've got Dale Steyn bowling booming outswingers at you with new balls from either end.

You back your openers to catch up to a decent SR more often than not. And again, as Latham learns his ODI game, I imagine he'll be more than capable of doing that. There have been plenty of good signs from him in this series, even if he's not a top-class ODI opener just yet.
 
Watson33

Watson33

U19 12th Man
Zinzan said:
There's no doubt opening with Guptill/Latham is philosophically completely different to Guptill/McCullum in terms of the innings strategy, it really depends which way you want to go.

I'm kind of split on this one. I do see some value in the more solid & consistent albeit less devastating and flamboyant starts Guptill and Latham could give us.

Guptill & McCullum will get you to 130/1 from 20 on a good day and 70/3 on a bad one, whereas Guptill/Latham will more often than not get you to around 90/1, with the added bonus of McCullum still to bat down the order.
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Nothing wrong with a platform and big guns to come in later on. Does mean you'd probably have to play Anderson instead of Elliot as the batting all-rounder. Elliot looked very easy to tie down when I saw him at Edgbaston earlier in the year.
 
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CaptainGrumpy

Banned
Dan said:
My philosophy is pretty simple: strike rate is meaningless if you're all out
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Other than the fact this excludes every single and all chasing teams in any and every single ODI tying any and every single match and then being in a possible position to win it before being dimissed all out, it then it goes further downhill.


Dan said:
(before the 45th).
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This person has moderator status on CW. God saves us all.


 
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CaptainGrumpy

Banned
Dan,

Feel free to ban me, but my view on ODI cricket is pretty simple. A tie is better than a loss (in less than 45 or up to and including 50 overs).

ODI cricket is a game of strike rate and averages for batsmen and economy rates as well as wickets for bowlers. There are no preserving wickets draws in ODI. There are extras.
 
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Dan

Hall of Fame Member


Yellow line is a rolling average of Latham's strike rate throughout every ODI innings as an opener since November 2013 (11 matches). Green line is a linear representation of his overall SR in that period (79.79)

Based on this, Latham 'catches up' to his career strike rate after his 31st ball faced. Things get skewed a bit by one T20-esque innings in Sri Lanka, and there are sample size issues galore (and there's no way I'm collating this ball-by-ball for other batsman too), but I thought it was interesting nonetheless.

Also noteworthy is that he drops back below the career strike rate from Ball 69-73 (visible in the very thin yellow line dropping below the green). Going through the ball-by-ball, there's lots of dots to spinners in the middle overs, so I suspect that explains that quirk. And that's Latham's area to work on, as I think everyone is noting.
 
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Kippax

Kippax

Cricketer Of The Year
The little champ gets nervous about bringing up his fifty sometimes. "Hey little dude, it's just a fifty", but he can't fully shake it.

Also the over or so after he's dropped, or has a big lbw shout on him or something, those can be dangerous times to be on a Latham top score bet. It would be great if he wore a heart rate monitor and waited until it subsided to an acceptable level before taking guard again.
 
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hendrix

hendrix

Hall of Fame Member
Dan said:
Also noteworthy is that he drops back below the career strike rate from Ball 69-73 (visible in the very thin yellow line dropping below the green). Going through the ball-by-ball, there's lots of dots to spinners in the middle overs, so I suspect that explains that quirk. And that's Latham's area to work on, as I think everyone is noting.
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Yes, this is what I said. He actually gets to 50 off around 55-60 balls, then tends to slow down. He's a very good player of spin (you can't score consecutive hundreds in the UAE if you're not) but does seem to slow down in the middle overs.
 
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Fuller Pilch

Hall of Fame Member
No, Latham will be fine. I remember 2-3 years ago Simon Doull saying KW should only play test cricket (lowish s/r) and now he is one of the best odi batsmen in the world and NZ's best ever.
 
hendrix

hendrix

Hall of Fame Member
Since when was a strike rate of 80 as an opener considered poor?

again, CG has been looking at scorecards not watching matches.
 
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CaptainGrumpy

Banned
hendrix said:
Since when was a strike rate of 80 as an opener considered poor?

again, CG has been looking at scorecards not watching matches.
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When Tom Latham strikes at around 72 when the team is chasing 280+ or 300+, the longer he bats for, the greater the scoreboard pressure is on the middle order.

Again, you focus far too much on runs scored, and not on the SR. For all the talk that Latham and other batsmen will increase their strike rate as they approach a century, that is understandable, except it is statistically less likely that a batsmen will go on to score a century, than not. So the slow SR issue remains for the NZ team, although a single player's batting average may look healthy - but its at the expense of SR - which effects the team's total.
 
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kiwiviktor81

kiwiviktor81

International Debutant
Fuller Pilch said:
No, Latham will be fine. I remember 2-3 years ago Simon Doull saying KW should only play test cricket (lowish s/r) and now he is one of the best odi batsmen in the world and NZ's best ever.
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When Williamson averaged in the low 40s in ODIs (not that long ago) his SR was about 80. As his average has gone up thanks to playing bigger innings his SR has gone up as well (now over 84).

I expect the same thing will happen to Latham, only to a lesser degree.

Also saying "SR of 75 = 225 after 50 overs" misses out several things. Extras, most notably. It also ignores that openers are setting a platform for the batsmen at 5 and later to score heavily. A Latham 60 (80) is a fine innings, even when chasing 300, if you have Elliott, Anderson, Ronchi et al. all hitting at 110 or higher for 20 overs.
 
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CaptainGrumpy

Banned
kiwiviktor81 said:
When Williamson averaged in the low 40s in ODIs (not that long ago) his SR was about 80. As his average has gone up thanks to playing bigger innings his SR has gone up as well (now over 84).

I expect the same thing will happen to Latham, only to a lesser degree.

Also saying "SR of 75 = 225 after 50 overs" misses out several things. Extras, most notably. It also ignores that openers are setting a platform for the batsmen at 5 and later to score heavily. A Latham 60 (80) is a fine innings, even when chasing 300, if you have Elliott, Anderson, Ronchi et al. all hitting at 110 or higher for 20 overs.
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A 60 off 80 means that the innings 20 runs behind the Required Run Rate. Elliot, Anderson and Ronchi hitting at 110 for 20 overs, is 132 runs, or 12 runs ahead of the innings required run rate at the start. That leaves a short fall of 8 runs. It also ignores whether Guptill, Kane, Taylor and whoever else have managed a 100 SR.

The fact that Latham can score runs and preserve his wicket is good. Very good. It is a quality bowling line up he faced with Steyn and Philander. Now, he needs to progress his game to scoring more swiftly because until he does so, I for one, am not buying into any hype about a man striking at 72 while batting at #2.
 
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kiwiviktor81

kiwiviktor81

International Debutant
CaptainGrumpy said:
A 60 off 80 means that the innings 20 runs behind the Required Run Rate. Elliot, Anderson and Ronchi hitting at 110 for 20 overs, is 132 runs, or 12 runs ahead of the innings required run rate at the start. That leaves a short fall of 8 runs. It also ignores whether Guptill, Kane, Taylor and whoever else have managed a 100 SR.
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A shortfall of 8 runs if there are zero extras. Which is exceptionally unlikely. 12-15 extras is more like the average, which means a win. Moreover, scoring 100 runs off the last 10 is becoming common, so 132 off 20 overs is probably an underestimate. A further point is that a Latham 60 (80) leaves a platform for KW, Taylor and Elliott to score faster as the need to preserve wickets is less of a factor (assuming Guptill goes averagely well).

I fully agree that an SR of 72 is not good enough. I also fully agree with you that SR is not taken into account anywhere near as much as it needs to be in ODI cricket. But I still think it's premature to be particularly concerned about it in Latham's case, as he isn't even a first choice player yet and hasn't had enough innings to really show what he can do.
 
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