Saturday, August 16, 2014

The place of Rangana Herath

Rangana Herath just completed 250 wickets after taking a fantastic 9/127 against Pakistan in an ongoing test (as I write this) played at the SSC, Colombo. 

The event prompted me to check out whether this diminutive, unheralded, unsung and hardworking bowler stood among his tribe of spin bowlers. 

I did a simple data comparison. Extracted the Top 20 spin bowlers (by wickets taken) from Cricinfo's Statsguru, and then calculated a metric - "Bowl Index" (copied from this source). "Bowl Index" basically takes into account both bowling average and strike rate. 

Here's the formula: (runs conceded)^2/(balls bowled * wickets taken)

And then I normalised the formula to account for total innings bowled (Bowl Index * 1000/Total Innings Bowled). 

The resulting data is as below: 




A Graphical representation of the above data list is below:





Rangana Herath, thus far, ranks just below Bishen Singh Bedi and Clarrie Grimmet in the all-time list. Not bad at all for the Lankan spin lynch-pin whom no one expected to take over the giant shoes of Muthiah Muralitharan. 

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