Let’s start, as all bad pieces of writing should, with a cliche: cricket is an individual sport dressed as a team game. Every match comprises hundreds or thousands of contests between a batter and a bowler. That unusual gameplay is one of the main reasons why Test cricket, in particular, touches the parts other sports cannot reach. But never mind all that soulful, meaning-of-life stuff; we’re here to talk about the joys of the humble statgasm.
Ever since doing a statistical preview of the 2002-03 Ashes for Wisden Cricket Monthly, an impossible glamorous commission for a budding anorak hack, The Spin has been fascinated by head-to-head averages, especially in Test cricket. Mano a mano and all that.
