Fast scoring batsmen

Here's a question for you - of those New Zealand cricketers who have scored at least 1000 test runs or faced 2000 balls, which batsman has scored at the fastest rate? Chris Cairns? Craig McMillan? Ian Smith maybe? Or John R Reid?

Nope, its Richard Hadlee. Paddles comes in at number 38 on the all-time world's fastest scoring batsmen list with a strike rate of 57.6 runs for every 100 balls faced. Top of the list are Shahid Afridi and Adam Gilchrist with staggering returns of 86.2 and 82.1 per 100 balls respectively.

One of the more interesting things about this analysis of scoring rates is how many modern players appear high on the list. Nine of the top twenty are still playing today.

Does this mean test cricket is getting faster and faster? Possibly, but a look at the bottom twenty reveals a handful of fairly modern names too - several of them New Zealanders. You don't expect to see Blair Pocock and Trevor Franklin on too many "best ever" lists, but there they are with almost record breakingly slow run rates of 29.8 and 23.0 runs per 100 balls. Franklin in fact is one the slowest scoring batsmen to have ever played the game, coming in only three places behind the slowest of them all - former New Zealand captain of the 1950s Geoff Rabone, who scored at a mind-numbingly dull 21.22 runs per 100 balls.

The first question most New Zealanders might have about the list of slow scorers is "what about Mark Richardson"? Well, he actually made his runs at a fairly respectable clip - scoring 37.6 runs for every 100 balls he faced. This puts him almost exactly halfway between New Zealand's fastest ever and our slowest ever, and at around the same rate as Andrew Jones (39.2).

So what does all this say about the state of test cricket? Well, I think it shows that test cricket was played at a fairly consistent speed right up until the end of the 1990s. It is only in the past few years that things have gone a little haywire and we are at a point now when scoring 300 runs in a day has become almost mundane. Richardson's apparently undeserved reputation as a dull and stolid blocker is perhaps proof of how easily this change has been accepted as normal by the public. Is this increase in run rates a good thing? In my opinion it is. But I think those running the game need to be cautious and make sure things don't go to far. Things as they stand are great, anything further and there is a risk that cricket might be reduced to the slogger's match that one-day cricket has become.