Age and experience matter in cricket - certain aspects of the game, like the bowling and playing of spin, can take years to master; and cricket does not penalize age to quite the extent that other sports do - losing your 'turn of speed' is for example much less problematic for a cricketer than for a footballer.
So how do England and Australia match-up in this Women's Ashes, looking at all the players who have played so far, in the Test and the 1st ODI?
When it comes to age, England and Australia are level-pegging. I have to admit that I wasn't expecting this - perhaps misled by the fact that Australia's stars Perry (23) and Lanning (21) are both relatively young compared to Edwards (34) and Brunt (28), I expected Australia to be a much younger side than England. In fact, while England's average age is 26, Australia's is only a year younger at 25.
When you factor-in experience though, it is a different story. I have commented previously that England play a lot more international cricket than anyone else; and that is reflected in the average number of 'caps' across all 3 formats.
Australia average 64 caps, while England are nearly twice as experienced with an average of 115 caps each.
I'm not suggesting that this explains everything about the way the series has gone so far... but it might explain something!
You may need to be bit careful with these Caps stats, especially the definition of 'more experienced'. Let's take ODI (since we've just played one). The England team had an average of 64.72 caps per player but 176 of the cumulative 712 were Lottie's. So what ? Well a team can have a high average caps per player but that doesn't necessarily make the team is more experienced than another team with fewer average caps per player. If a small number of players have a very high number of caps then this lifts the average caps per player but that experience is restricted to just a few players.
ReplyDeleteSorry I've not done the analysis but the spread of caps across the 11 players in each team needs to be analysed.
As a piece of total trivia the most experienced ODI team (in terms of cumulative caps across the team) that England have sent out was 829 in the 1st ODI against Australia last summer.(18,18,37,67,68,71,80,83,107,110,170). By any measure I'd agree that's experienced with 8 of the 11 players having played more than 50 ODIs.
Oops, sorry should have added the distribution of England caps in the ODI just played was 4,8,21,31,31,40,86,86,113,116,176. Haven't worked out the Australian spread yet.
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