Cricket writing, from our own data
Cricket records, rules explained and notes on the daily puzzles. Written from our own dataset, never rewritten from a news site.
Graeme Smith by the numbers, and the youngest captain who lasted
9,265 Test runs and 108 Tests as captain, having been given the job at 22 in a side that had just lost its captain to a match-fixing ban.
Home advantage in cricket, measured rather than assumed
Home sides win around half of all Test matches and lose about a quarter, and the gap grew through the 2010s while it shrank in almost every other sport.
How a cricket pitch is prepared, and what green really means
Grass, moisture and rolling are the three variables a groundsman controls, and green on television tells you almost nothing about which of them is present.
How cricket helmets went from optional to compulsory
For a century batters faced fast bowling bare-headed, and the argument was about courage rather than physics. It took forty years and a death to settle it.
How the daily cricket puzzles choose their answers
Why every puzzle is decided ninety days in advance, how the weekly difficulty curve works, and what happens when a puzzle turns out to be unfair.
How the ICC rankings actually work, and what they measure
Ratings out of 1,000 rather than points for wins, weighted by who you beat and how recently, which is why a side can win a series and lose ground.
Ian Botham by the numbers, and the summer that made him
383 Test wickets and 5,200 runs, and a career that is remembered almost entirely for six weeks in 1981 when he won a series nobody thought England could win.
Imran Khan by the numbers, and the side he built
362 Test wickets and 3,807 runs, plus a captaincy that took Pakistan from unreliable to a World Cup, largely by finding fast bowlers nobody else had noticed.
Inzamam-ul-Haq by the numbers, and the innings that made him
8,830 Test runs at 49.60 and 11,739 in one-day cricket, from a batter who hit the ball harder than anybody and ran between the wickets worse than anybody.
Jacques Kallis by the numbers, and the case for the best all-rounder
13,289 Test runs at 55.37 and 292 Test wickets. Nobody else has been a top-order batter of that standard and a front-line seamer at the same time.
James Anderson by the numbers, and 704 wickets as a seam bowler
704 Test wickets from 188 matches, more than any fast bowler in history, taken by somebody who was faster at 25 and much better at 35.
Javed Miandad by the numbers, and the last-ball six
8,832 Test runs at 52.57, appearances in six World Cups across twenty-one years, and the single most replayed delivery in Pakistan-India cricket.