Saturday, 12 March 2005

Lucky and unlucky bowlers

I would hardly describe Shane Bond as "lucky" given his injury problems, but according to a fairly comprehensive Cricinfo study that is what he is. Bond and Chris Cairns feature on a list which determines which bowlers take the greatest proportion of wickets with "potential wicket-taking balls" (ie balls which beat the batsman). The luckiest bowler of them all, by a huge margin, is Nantie Hayward who has taken 35 wickets but has only beaten a batsman 34 times. I would like to see a replay of that 35th wicket. No New Zealanders appear on the list of "unlucky" bowlers (headed by Ashley Giles), although Dan Vettori does feature on the list of players who have the most catches dropped off their bowling.

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