Wicketkeeper batsmanship by debut year

The following two charts detail the batting average of any Test wicketkeeper with over 50 dismissals. The trend line designates where Test batting averages have come from and are leading towards. 

The second chart details removes the five players - AB de Villiers, Brendon McCullum, Kumar Sangakkara, Andy Flower and Alec Stewart - who played considerable amounts of Test cricket as a specialist batsman.

According to this chart it seems that by approximately 2030 Test wicketkeepers should continue to improve with the bat such that they will approach the calibre of specialist batsmen themselves. 

2014-15 Goal Difference by minute

Comparing when within a game that EPL teams score or concede most might provide some information as to their fitness, concentration and tactics. You can find each team's performance broken down per minute here, or in the Room of Informational Illusions.

Australian spinners - graphicalized!

Man, Nathan Lyon can get hit. But comparisons to Tim May don't do him any justice, as the chart above demonstrates.

You know who Nathan Lyon does compare to? His near-immediate predecessor in the Australian team, Nathan Hauritz. In fact, it's so similar, it's disconcerting...

Relative merits, great South African Test bowlers

Dale Steyn's pretty damn good. And for a guy who I remember as really fast but didn't trouble Australia as much as his counterparts, Allan Donald fares especially well. As usual, qualifier is 200 Test wickets.

Updated 2014-15 individual plus/minus stats now available

Expanded statistics for every Premier League player can be found here, or in the Room of Informational Illusions.

Relative merits, great Indian Test bowlers

As per the last three posts, this chart plots the relative effectiveness of the Indian bowlers to take 200 Test wickets. The size of the circle is their comparative wickets-per-innings (i.e. the larger the circle, the more average wickets the bowlers claims per innings).

The comparison between legspinners Chandrasekhar and Kumble is striking, while when choosing one of Bishen Bedi and Harbhajan Singh (personally, I'd opt for Erapalli Prasanna, who missed the cut by 11 wickets), one must decide on whether to value attack (Harbhajan) or defence (Bedi). The strike rates and averages are comparatively higher from the other charts in this series, which is presumably a reflection on low, slow subcontinental pitches.

Relative merits, great West Indian Test bowlers

Best West Indian fast bowler? Take your pick - and there have been some good ones. This chart tallies up the Calypso Kings' bowlers to have taken 200 Test wickets and shows that the 1970s and 1980s truly were an exceptional period for West Indian cricket.

Circle size represents the player's wickets-per-innings, which as you can make out is remarkably close (Walsh 2.14, Holding 2.20, Roberts 2.24, Ambrose 2.26, Garner 2.33, Marshall 2.49).

Relative merits, great Australian Test bowlers

Following on from our chart yesterday, here's one about Australia. It effectively demonstrates the quality of Dennis Lillee and Glenn McGrath as world-beaters while also establishing Mitchell Johnson as the wicket-taking phenom he has been over the past two years.

Given the different era in which he played, Ray Lindwall fared very well while the dearly departed Richie Benaud's (a strike-rate nearly 10% worse than any other Aussie bowler to take 200 wickets) perhaps comes out worst, despite his outstanding record.

Relative merits, great English bowlers

This chart details the relative details of some of England's finest Test match bowlers. The X-axis displays the player's Strike Rate, the Y-axis their Test average. The size of the circle represents the number of wickets per innings the player took (for reference, the lowest total listed here was Flintoff at 1.64 wickets per innings, while Sidney Barnes took 3.78 per).

The bowlers most likely to take cheap, quick wickets are therefore closer to the centre point of the chart.

Introducing EPL Effect Size Index

Effect Size Index (ESI) tracks how well a team performs when a player is on the park, as opposed to their scoring/concession rates when he is not. 

A player who plays every minute of every contest for his club - usually a goalkeeper or centre-back, will have an ESI of 0.000, as this statistic charts the difference between the team's performance when a player is on the pitch (in terms of frequency of goals scored/conceded) and compares it to his club's overall rates of goals scored/conceded. Thus, a player who plays every minute of the season - or who's Individual Plus/Minus per 90 minute matches that of his club - has an ESI of 0.

Take, for example, Jack Wilshere (please). Arsenal score less frequently when he is on the pitch, while conceding more often: Arsenal have GD this season of +7, but while Wilshere has been on the pitch the Gunners have been outscored by a total of 10 goals to 4 (making Wilshere's +/- a poor -6). While this might be bad luck, bad teammates or bad Jack, and keeping in mind that 0.000 is for want of a better word "baseline", his ESI is a phenomenally bad -1.527.

You can find the ESI of every player who has managed 450 minutes on the pitch this season by clicking this link. Player are grouped by position, and arranged in order of best to worst ESI.