Adam Voges And The Search For The New Bradman

Posted on March 11, 2016 by Nichael Bluth in Scorer's Notes

 

Over the years we’ve heard some pretty ridiculous cricket-related things. There was the time that someone reckoned that Danny Briggs would actually amount to something, plus the time a particularly drunk Australian opined that Kevin Pietersen should have played for Australia. And that’s before we even get into our series predictions, which are inevitably completely and utterly wrong in every possible way.

However, none of these are as ridiculous as newspapers talking about Adam Voges as if he were the new Bradman. Just because he happens to average the best part of a hundred after 15 Tests, that doesn’t mean that Dermot Reeve will suddenly be on eBay selling mysteriously acquired merchandise with his signature on. And we’ll be damned if we can’t find some statistics to prove our point.

The obvious starting point is not their respective Test batting averages, but their First Class numbers instead. Bradman’s is a frankly absurd 95.14, sustained over some 234 matches. Adam Voges’ is a rather more prosaic 48.21, not a bad record per se but less than the likes of Graeme Hick, Graham Gooch and Graeme Pollock. Although it is better than both Graeme Swann and Graham Onions. Quite how we came to only rate these things in terms of Grahams (and Graemes) is a bit of a mystery, even to us.

In the Test arena, Bradman finished with a Test average of 99.94, a number that a whole generation of Australian immigrants will have written on their hand at some point. Following the 2-0 series win over New Zealand, Voges’ average is 95.50. In the grand scheme of things, that’s pretty close. But of course, it doesn’t tell the whole story.

When working with a small number of innings, the number of not outs has a disproportionately large impact on the overall batting average. Bradman’s 80 innings included 10 not outs, or 12.5% of the total. Voges has 7 not outs from 21 innings (33%, or roughly three times more often). To reduce this impact, we can simply ignore not outs all together and calculate what we’ll call the batting mean (runs scored/number of innings). In Bradman’s case the batting mean would be 87.5; in Voges’ it would be 63.67.

This methodology may not be perfect (for a start, it punishes Voges for actually winning the match at his last visit to the crease), but then neither is batting average, as we’ve already seen. Batting mean is probably a better measure at the beginning of a career when things are more volatile, while batting average makes more sense over a longer period of time (as the two naturally start to merge anyway). In case there’s any doubt, Voges is very much in that beginning bit, despite already being pretty old.

Another aspect to consider is the rather more prosaic number of runs scored. For something so fundamental, this measure doesn’t actually get trotted out all that often, probably because people find big numbers challenging. Which was certainly our excuse that time we got a summons for not paying Council Tax.

From his 21 innings Voges has 1,337 runs to his name. At the equivalent stage, Bradman had 1,889, the small matter of 552 runs (or 41%) more. That’s a big gap. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to that gap. Purely for the fun of it we looked up Graeme Gooch’s numbers and it turned out that he had 473 runs at 24.89 at the same stage of his career, just 1,146 behind Bradman but largely in line with anyone that he went on to coach at Test level.

Having established that Voges isn’t the new Bradman, the obvious question is what is he? The answer is a statistical anomaly, a modern day Andy Ganteaume, a decent player enjoying a more-than-decent run of form. In Voges’ case, it’s the fact that this run comes at the start of his Test career makes the numbers stand out. Had they come after a year or two of him averaging (say) 40 nobody would be banging out about the Don.

To prove this point we spent a particularly scintillating afternoon in the office compiling the career records of some of the finest batsmen ever to play the game, working out what their best ever average over 21 innings was. This sounds like an awful lot of work and it was. But it was still more fun than watching Here Come The Habibs.

Batsman	Highest 21 innings average	Date achieved	Final innings score	Final innings opposition
Bradman	131.50	30/12/1932	103*	v England
Chanderpaul	116.08	19/12/2008	126*	v New Zealand
Sangakkara	105.65	16/11/2007	192	v Australia
Kallis	102.75	25/10/2002	139*	v Bangladesh
M Yousuf	102.15	19/01/2007	32	v South Africa
Devereux	101.69	16/07/2015	215	v England
Sobers	100.88	06/01/1960	226	v England
Clarke	100.22	22/02/2013	130	v India
S Waugh	99.86	26/12/1996	37	v West Indies
Bell	98.13	18/08/2011	235	v India
Voges	95.50	20/02/2016	10*	v New Zealand
Ponting	91.84	26/12/2003	257	v India
Hayden	91.65	16/03/2004	54	v Sri Lanka
de Villiers	89.13	03/01/2012	160*	v Sri Lanka
Richards	87.71	18/03/1977	50	v Pakistan
Jayawardene	87.25	22/03/2008	33	v West Indies
Dravid	86.47	26/12/2003	49	v Australia
Amla	86.00	14/10/2013	118	v Pakistan
Gavaskar	85.89	30/08/1979	221	v England
Tendulkar	85.72	16/12/2010	111*	v South Africa
Gooch	85.45	20/06/1991	37	v West Indies
Border	83.07	09/11/1984	15	v West Indies
Hammond	82.44	24/06/1938	240	v Australia
Miandad	82.08	24/03/1979	129*	v Australia
Cook	81.70	18/08/2011	34	v India
G Chappell	81.57	14/01/1977	28	v Pakistan
Lara	81.50	03/06/2005	153	v Pakistan
Laxman	81.27	12/11/2010	74	v New Zealand
M Taylor	81.16	03/02/1990	101*	v Pakistan
Sehwag	80.05	12/11/2010	54*	v New Zealand
Y Khan	78.00	30/10/2014	46	v Australia
Inzamam	75.41	13/07/2006	56*	v England
G Smith	75.22	03/01/2009	30*	v Australia
Greenidge	74.63	07/12/1984	95	v Australia
Boycott	73.82	26/07/1973	97	v West Indies
Cowdrey	73.00	30/12/1965	104	v Australia
G Lloyd	72.17	10/12/1983	161*	v India
Kirsten	71.47	02/01/2004	10*	v West Indies
Haynes	67.00	20/02/1987	121	v New Zealand
M Waugh	66.13	02/01/1999	121	v England
Boon	65.24	05/08/1993	38*	v England
Gayle	65.06	12/03/2013	40	v Zimbabwe
Strauss	64.33	30/07/2009	69	v Australia
Pietersen	62.70	07/06/2007	68	v West Indies
Stewart	62.58	05/06/1997	40*	v Australia
Ganguly	61.20	02/01/2008	51	v Australia
Langer	60.83	03/10/2002	72	v Pakistan
Gower	60.60	11/04/1986	21	v West Indies
Atherton	57.11	25/07/1996	64	v Pakistan
S Fleming	55.28	10/06/2004	117	v England

Now hopefully you managed to overcome the clunkiness of our table thingy (here’s a clue: try the button marked ‘Next‘) and discovered that Adam Voges doesn’t even sit on the first page of results. In fact he’s even below our former Lord and saviour Ian Bell. If that doesn’t discredit the Voges myth then nothing will.

Seeing Shiv Chanderpaul in second place brought back some fond memories of the series that gave this site its name, plus less fond memories of necking an entire bottle of gin to try and take away the pain of actually watching him bat. And then there’s Devereux in sixth place. Just in case we haven’t made it clear: we love him, even if he has started whining about every single decision ever.

To conclude then, Voges is just enjoying an excellent run of form at the tail end of a reasonable enough career. Now if people want to start comparing Devereux to Bradman, then we’re more than happy to get on board with that particular campaign.