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.)