Revisiting the Cricket World Cup through some numbers!

Cricket’s biggest carnival, the ICC Cricket World Cup is long concluded and people have since moved onto IPL. We at ES revive some memories of the Cup  Down Under through some very uncharacteristic stats and numbers, and some pretty unique records that this particular World Cup played host toHighest run aggregate in a match:

The pool A match between Australia and Sri Lanka saw Australia pose a hefty target of 377 for Sri Lanka, thanks to an amazing performance from their middle order and a 73 ball 102 from Glen Maxwell.

The Lankans managed to put only 312 on board and fell short of the target by 64 runs. Sangakkara scored his third consecutive ton, another record in itself. The match was in the world cup history’s highest run aggregate match. Not too surprising though, considering this year’s world cup is often dubbed as the batsman’s tournament, with batsmen dominating throughout the tournament.

262 runs scored by Ian Bell, the highest run getter for England at an average of 52.40. England’s highest run scorer for the tournament had a lower aggregate than the highest run getter for Bangladesh, Ireland, UAE, Zimbabwe, which is symbolic of how bad this World Cup was for England.

The lowest team total this year was the 102 scored by UAE against India. This implies that for the first time in 6 world cups, each time managed to cross a score of 100

10.40 was the economy of West Indian fast bowler Jason Holder for his 10 over spell against South Africa. This is now the worst economy for a bowler in a World Cup having completed his entire spell, easily overtaking the previous worst economy of 9.70 in 1987.

The number of extras are a good way of judging how disciplined the bowling attack is of any team. This years World Cup brought forth some pretty unexpected statistics.
Strangely, South Africa was the team leading with the most number of extras given, a total of 123 from 8 matches. While the South African pace attack has been one of the best in the world, they might want to look into this issue to improve further. The team with the least extras given in the World Cup is neither Australia, neither New Zealand nor India. The team is Bangladesh! They only gave away 50 extras in 6 games! Signs of progress?

Boundary Percentage- Lowest and highest:

For this we are only considering 50 + scores. The man with the highest boundary percentage is the man who was on a different mission than any other player out there. His mission was not only to win, but to win as soon as possible. The man is none other than Brendon McCullum. Fans saw a different avatar of Kiwi captain, who came out and opened his team’s batting, going after bowlers from the word go.

His 77 against England had him hitting eight fours and seven sixes, which makes it 74 runs in boundaries and 96.1% of his runs scored in 4s and 6s.
On the other side we have the calm and steady, heavily criticised Pakistan’s skipper Misbah-ul Haq who scored 56 runs but hitting only 4 fours, ie , 16 runs in boundaries. This translates to 26.8% of his run via boundaries.

In the eight matches that they played, Australia managed to pick 79 wickets, missing out just the final wicket of New Zealand in their Pool match. India also presented staggering figures despite worries over bowling department prior to the tournament. The Indians managed to grab 67 wickets in the 7 matches they played, missing out the last three Australian wickets in the semi-final. On the bottom half of this table, UAE only managed to grab 5.2 wickets an average during their run of the World Cup. Surprising fact is that the average wickets taken down by Afghanistan and Scotland were higher than what England managed to take, which further reinstated Englands dismal performance this World Cup.

Edited by Aashna Bakshi