Thursday, 20 March 2008

Ben on...Northern Districts' Southee

So who is this Tim Southee? We all got to see him in the Twenty20s and he looked good. And he knocked over a whole bunch of teenagers at the under-19 world cup. Richard Hadlee thinks very highly of him. But for those of us outside the loop, he only appeared at the end of last year. So what do we know of him? What are the huge expectations based on?

The most cricket we can use for analysis are the 11 first-class games he has played for Northern since last year. Here are his stats:
            Mat Wkts Ave   Econ SR
Tim Southee 11 41 25.63 2.70 56.7
How does this compare with the other bowlers? Here are the stats for the fast-medium test bowlers
               Mat Wkts Ave   Econ SR
Chris Martin 118 378 30.26 3.02 59.9
Kyle Mills 52 156 26.05 2.90 53.7
Mark Gillespie 47 188 24.88 3.17 46.9
Ian O'Brien 52 188 24.31 2.87 50.6
James Franklin 89 310 24.80 3.14 47.2
Jacob Oram 71 135 25.02 2.33 64.3
On the basis of this, he clearly already compares very well with our best bowlers. In fact, all 'round, he has the best figures (based on only 11 games however); he has as good an average as the others, a great economy rate and a decent strike rate. (He is also listed as medium-fast instead of fast-medium, which should make him faster, but who knows how Cricinfo define things.)

2 comments:

Unknown said...

I believe the definition is

Class mph | kph

Fast 90+ | 145+
Fast-medium 80 to 89 | 129 to 145
Medium-fast 70 to 79 | 113 to 129
Medium 60 to 69 | 97 to 113
Medium-slow 50 to 59 | 80 to 97
Slow-medium 40 to 49 | 64 to 80
Slow below 40 | below 64

Mike said...

Surely those numbers can't be right? That would make Dan Vettori a "medium-slow" bowler - with his arm ball bowled at "medium pace". And I can't ever recall any spinner pitching the ball at below 64kmph.