The Spin | Nimble or nervous 90s? Cricket maths show best approach to scoring a century
Stats tell us batters have less reason to be anxious in the 90s than common lore suggests, though the pain and fear of falling short is all too realIf you’ve ever been lucky enough to score a century you’ll know how seismic a moment it is when you finally get over the line.Some play the game for a lifetime and never make one, the three-figured kingdom for ever out of reach, a promised land they are destined never to enter.Yet cricket lures you back like a devilish lover.You just can’t quit it.Next time might be your time.
It could be you.Why not?In cricket the century is the hallmark of individual success for a batter, the team sport unique in the way that it lauds personal milestones.The Test Match Special statistician Andy Zaltzman says that a century “carves an immutable notch in a player’s history and, at the highest level, an eternal legacy in the annals of the game”.The difference between a two- and three-figure score might be only one run but in cricket they may as well be different realms.Galaxies divided by a single.
Ask the handful of players who have been out for 99 in Test cricket, they’ll tell you.It’s one run and yet it is everything.Getting close to these “slivers of immortality” has prompted plenty of players, even the greats, to wilt while on the cusp.“I was a little bit nervous,” Jacob Bethell admitted after scoring his sunburst of a maiden first class and Test century in Sydney last week.Bethell spent eight balls on 99, his parents Graham and Giselle and his sister Laura having an entire cattery’s worth of kittens in the Brewongle Stand.
Their boy appeared at least to be ice cold, shutting up shop to the returning threat of Mitchell Starc and the unrelenting Scott Boland before seizing on the opportunity to skip down and loft Beau Webster’s off-spin over midwicket to get over the line and carve his first notch.“I was nowhere near as nervous as I was in New Zealand when I forgot to watch the ball,” Bethell added, recalling his previous highest Test score of 96 in the second Test against the Kiwis in Wellington last winter.On that occasion Bethell tried to get over the line with a rasping cover drive off Tim Southee only to edge behind and be caught agonisingly short.“It would have been flair if I’d smacked him through the covers to bring it up,” Bethell apparently said to Ben Stokes in the dressing room afterwards.Bethell’s response says much about his confidence in his own talent.
“It was always coming,” he noted matter of factly in the press conference after that first century.His bustling approach to the 90s in Wellington is actually a common one and is borne out by a published academic paper on the phenomena of the nervous 90s by a group of Australian academics in 2023.“You could actually call it the nimble 90s,” says Dr Leo Roberts, one of the authors of the paper and a research fellow at the University of Melbourne.“Our findings showed that actually batters accelerated their scoring as they approached a hundred and were more likely to hit a boundary when they were close to it too.”The nervous energy is more likely to mean a batter at Test level rattles towards a ton than gets out it seems.
Zaltzman’s findings back this up.He sends the Spin a series of brain-melting spreadsheets that, when deciphered, show that in the history of men’s Test cricket, 38.4% of all batters’ innings result in them getting out between 0 and 9 and that 17.3% of innings that reach 90 end with the player dismissed before reaching a century.In Test matches since 2000 those figures are 37.
8 % and 16.6%.The numbers reveal that the 90s are actually the 10-run bracket in which a Test batter is least likely to get out, not just between 0 and 100 but also from 0-140.This isn’t to say players don’t get nervous as they approach the milestone.Many, including most recently Bethell, will admit to feeling the butterflies as they approach cricket’s immutable landmark.
Test history shows us players that are rendered shotless and stupefied on the ascent to three figures despite the comfort blanket the overall statistics provide.If only they knew.Zaltzman himself laughs in the face of such numerical pressure.“In my first hundred, I went from 84 to 100 with four successive cuts for four.It was a local derby, Penshurst v Chiddingstone, so massive pressure.
”All of which is to say that if you do ever find yourself, inexplicably or otherwise, out in the middle and approaching a hundred, remember, the 90s are not the minefield you might think they are.It might even pay to put your foot down and do it in style, plenty of players at the highest level have taken this approach and succeeded.Be flair, but most importantly: get there.This is an extract from the Guardian’s weekly cricket email, The Spin.To subscribe, just visit this page and follow the instructions
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