Sachin Tendulkar is not in peak form, but there is no need to be alarmists

Sachin Tendulkar has been bowled way too many times in recent matches er actually five times in 24 innings since April 2011. Arunabha Sengupta tries to look at the career of the master and determine whether being bowled has historically had anything to do with his age or performance.

 

Sachin Tendulkar has been bowled way too many times in recent matches … er … actually five times in 24 innings since April 2011. Arunabha Sengupta tries to look at the career of the master and determine whether being bowled has historically had anything to do with his age or performance. 

 

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Since turning 38 in April 2011, Sachin Tendulkar has scored 841 runs in 13 Tests at an unremarkable average of 35.04. His last such lean patch occurred quite some time back, between 2005 and 2007.

 

One cannot dispute that he has not been anywhere near his peak form. And being Sachin Tendulkar – the biggest icon in India – he has had plenty of hasty obituaries penned in ‘honour’ of his long, sterling career.

 

What has lent fuel to fire is his getting bowled three times in succession against New Zealand. Such a mouth-watering sequence is too tempting to ignore in a country where cricket comes a poor second to the sport of jumping to conclusions. Especially so with the three dismissals replayed again and again on television channels, the YouTube video clips shared ad infinitum on Social Networks, simulating death rattles each and every time in mass perception.

 

The objective of this article is to find out whether there is any cause for declaring national emergency each time the great man’s defence is breached and the ball finds its way to the stumps.

 

In an earlier article, we had analysed the figures of batsmen across history, to try and decipher a link between age, slowing down and being dismissed with the stumps knocked over. And in spite of our best efforts, we had not been able to detect any statistically significant indication that batsmen do indeed tend to get bowled more often with age. Neither did we come across any proof that being dismissed in this way is related to the results achieved with the willow.

 

Our past studies showed precisely that the tremendous amount of sound and fury surrounding each Tendulkar bowled dismissal signified nothing.

 

Now let us look at the batsman himself in isolation. He has left a trail of rich and mind-boggling numbers in the wake of his glorious achievements. Let us try to use the data to determine whether his frequency of being bowled has really increased or it is one of the many delusions the media increasingly likes to deal in. Also, we are interested to see whether we can correlate this to a sure decline in his performances.

 

We have tabulated the age-wise figures of Tendulkar in Tests, to demonstrate how his performance has varied with time and how frequently he has been out bowled over the years.

 

Sachin Tendulkar’s numbers over the years

 

Age	Batting Average	% of Bowled dismissals
16-17	39.20	20.00
18	46.00	12.5
19	51.45	0.00
20	83.50	33.33
21	67.00	0.00*
22	29.00	50.00*
23	47.25	25.00
24	85.00	27.24
25	52.08	8.33
26	61.35	14.28
27	76.00	0.00
28	71.81	6.67
29	49.57	42.02
30	54.91	8.33
31	55.33	16.66
32	27.91	16.66
33	33.16	16.66
34	61.88	27.78
35	47.19	4.76
36	84.25	37.45
37	77.81	18.76
38+	35.04	20.83
Total	55.08	18.08

 

*Low sample size – very few innings

 

· Correlation between Age and Frequency of getting bowled: 0.19 (insignificant positive correlation)

· Correlation between Batting Average and Frequency of getting bowled: : -0.21 (insignificant weak negative correlation)

 

The inferences

 

While his performance in terms of run making has remained phenomenal but for a dip between 2005-2007, his pattern of being bowled is chaotic at best.

 

He has been out in this fashion most frequently in 2002-03, while being very much at the peak of his powers. Again, when he hit a purple patch during 2009-10, he was bowled more frequently thanusual, indeed more often than in the last year or so.

 

Since turning 38, he has been bowled five times in 24 completed innings.

 

Yes, it has been only five times that he has had his stumps rattled in the last one and a half years. Any mathematician worth his salt will testify that three continuous dismissals of the same type is in all probability a very natural ‘run of events’.

 

However, with the spotlight continuously on him and the dismissals replayed over and over on numerous media channels, it has assumed proportions of a daily feature in public consciousness.

 

The numbers show that there is no objective conclusion that we can reach from them.

 

 

Definition:   Correlation Coefficient

Takes two ordered data sets, X and Y, and produces a number between -1 and +1. (eg. ‘Frequency of bowled’ and ‘batting average’) ·  Correlation Coefficient close to -1 => there is a strong negative correlation,  if X increases, Y decreases. ·  Correlation Coefficient close to +1 => there is a strong positive correlation,  if X increases, Y increases. ·  Correlation Coefficient close to 0 => there is weak correlation. X and Y are not dependent on each other

 

Now, if we compute the correlation between age and frequency of getting bowled for Tendulkar, we find it to be 0.19 – close to zero, small enough to be deemed negligible. We can say that being bowled is not in any way related to his age.

 

Next, if we compute the correlation between batting average and frequency of getting bowled, we find that there is a very low negative correlation of -0.21. Again we can conclude that being bowled has not historically interfered with batting average of the master.

 

Obviously, the eternal downside of using numbers in such a situation is to get rebuffed, the most common reaction being, “Cricket is not played with calculators.”

 

Of course not, but neither is the great game played on news channels. Besides, calculators can be quite handy in making inferences from the rich storehouse of data the game is endowed with. Properly interpreted there are robust ways of making sense of the stories these numbers tell us.

 

If we are too familiar with the limitations associated with ponds, waves can be a surprise. We can easily conclude that pebbles must have been thrown into the water causing the ripples. It may be quite a while before we discover that we are actually sitting next to an infinite ocean, which is too vast for us to fathom.

 

Ad hoc obituaries of all-time greats often mirror this tendency.

 

(Arunabha Sengupta is a cricket historian and Chief Cricket Writer at CricketCountry. He writes about the history and the romance of the game, punctuated often by opinions about modern day cricket, while his post-graduate degree in statistics peeps through in occasional analytical pieces. The author of three novels, he can be followed on Twitter at http://twitter.com/senantix)

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