Cricket is intrinsically biased?
A recent article on Cricinfo clearly brings out an argument that I have thought about on several occasions - that cricket is intrinsically biased in favor of bowlers. Here's the relevant extract:
If the rules are on the side of the batsmen, it's because the game itself is intrinsically biased towards the bowlers. They get six chances an over; they have 10 people to help them; they can have a rest for an hour or two; they can make one mistake and it hardly matters. They set the tone: in tennis terms, it's always their serve. Physically, it's tougher being a bowler, but psychologically, it's tougher being a batsman, and as the players often tell us, top-class cricket is played largely in the mind.This is an important argument to make so as to counter the constant criticisms levelled against ODIs that the rules are biased towards batsman. If the game is in itself biased towards bowlers, it of course makes sense to add rules that even out the disadvantage that batsmen face.
I haven't thought through this logic myself. Decided to put it out here as food for thought for everyone.
posted by Harsha V. Madhyastha @ 3:31 PM
2 Comments:
the argument that the bowler has more leeway to make mistakes and has more shots at the batsman, and has fielders to help him in his efforts seems rather naive. somewhere people have to account for the conditions of the pitch, the ball etc --> theres only finitely many things that one can do with the ball and not every one of them is lethal from a batsman's perspective. Also even if the bowler does something out of the ordinary, theres no guarantee that the potency of his delivery is retained after the ball pitches. Specifically to fast bowlers it used to be the case that intimidation using bouncers/body directed deliveries used to be effective, with improvement in protective gear that has effectively taken out the fear/psychological advantage that fast bowlers historically had. For spinners, most pitches dont offer vicious turn, and even if it turns its slow turn that is easily negotiable.
In an ODI, a great bowler will get 1-2 wickets (per 60 balls bowled) and the batsmen averages (40 runs of 50 balls faced).
Apart from the wickets, the bowler would have bowled like 5-10 wicket taking deliveries and 10-15 good deliveries to stop the run flow, most of the remaining being mediocre or bad. (On a flat wicket the above average will go down alarmingly).
From the batsmen's point of view, out of the 40 runs, probably 5-10 would be good/great shots. And, of the remaining deliveries, when he scores he'd feel an edge over the bowler.
So, all in all, the bowler is satisfied around 20% of the time and extremely happy around 2-3% of the time. The batsmen would be extremely happy around 10% of the time and satisfied probably 40-50% of the time (when he scores/defends well).
I know this isn't a great analysis, but still probably better than the one you cited. So, I'd say we need to move more in favor of bowlers rather than batsmen.
Of course, this analysis doesn't take into account how the viewers feel. I'd anyday take a low scoring game on a Perth pitch watching greats like Tendulkar and Ponting working hard against Ambrose, McGrath and Akram. But, that's just me.
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