How do different teams fare against the spin bowlers in the limited over Cricket games? The weakness of some international teams against spinners in Test Cricket is well known. In this blog post, we do a more in-depth analysis of how different teams play against spinners in One Day International Cricket.
We compiled the data for the performance of batsmen against leg-break and off-break bowlers in the ODIs played from year 2007 onward (other spin bowlers such as Chinaman and Orthodox bowlers were excluded from this analysis). The graph below shows the plot of strike rate versus average against spinners for each of the 9 Test Cricket playing countries, compared to the average performance against the spinners (shown by the red axes in the graph).
Without a doubt, South Africans are the best players of spin in ODIs, and they have the highest strike rate as well as the highest batting average against spin bowlers in the last five years. It is also not surprising to see the two sub-continent teams, India and Pakistan, performing well against spinners. We can safely say that these three teams are the “good” players of spin.
On the other hand, West Indies and Bangladesh both perform much below average with respect to both the strike rate and the batting average. Clearly these two teams are the “ugly” players against spinners.
The remaining four teams – England, New Zealand, Australia and Sri Lanka – fall somewhere between these two extremes. England, who are notorious for being bad players of spinners, are actually not all that bad: their strike rate against spinners is above average, but they also tend to get out against spin bowlers at an above average rate. The relatively poor performance of Sri Lanka against spinners is certainly surprising, given that they have quite a few technically fine batsmen who are known to be good players of spin.
Australia is certainly an interesting case study in how they handle spinners – while their batting average against spinners is almost equal to that of Pakistan, they score at a much slower rate. The best word to describe the approach of Aussies against spinners would be “cautious”.
So, to sum up, here are the good, the not so good and the ugly players of spin:
Good: South Africa, India, Pakistan
Not so good: Australia, England, New Zealand, Sri Lanka
Ugly: Bangladesh, West Indies