AUS vs IND First test - Statistical washup - Pujara played out of his skin.

Well India takes first blood as I predicted. Played well. Australia stayed in it, but our top order looks dicey.




Wanted to perform a statistical analysis about who played the best. So I turn to my trusty friend, the z-score (score-average/SD), to give me the good oil.




On the batting, if I calculate the z-score on total runs...we only have 3 players who batted with a z-score of over 0.5 (which is my benchmark for quality play)




CA Pujara: z-score of 3.1!!!
TM Head - z-score of 1
AM Rahane - z-score of 0.93




On the poor performing side we have 5 players who had poor batting displays




JR Hazlewood: z-score of -0.83
AJ Finch: z-score of -0.89
Mohammed Shami: z-score of -1.02
I Sharma: z-score of -1.07
JJ Bumrah: z-score of  -1.17




Finch had a shocker. Needs to do better than this as an opening batsman. The rest are bowlers so can be forgiven.


On the bowling side, if I calculate the z-score on wickets/runs (i.e the inverse of average), we get the following over 0.5




JJ Bumrah: z-score of 1.17!!
MA Starc: z-score of 0.96
JR Hazlewood: z-score of 0.60
Mohammed Shami: z-score of 0.52




On the poor performing side we have




PJ Cummins: z-score of -0.68
TM Head: z-score of -1.76
M Vijay: z-score of -1.76




Again, Cummins had a shocker. The other 2 are not established bowlers so are forgiven. Funny that Lyon is not included, with his 8 wickets, but he bled a lot of runs.


So the difference really was in the batting. Pujara played at 3 Standard Deviations better than the rest. Can't get too much better than that.


Bowling was pretty equal, but Cummins was poor.