In today's blogpost, I offer a preview of the most significant element in the upcoming Ashes series, which I hope you will grin and bear while enjoying Peruvian marmalade for breakfast. This pivotal event is…
The Race to Paddington!
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| Who's going to get there first? |
Some cricket experts would describe this race as incredibly, pointlessly niche, mainly because the two players involved don’t even know they are in a race, and probably wouldn’t care about it if they did. Those experts are quite wrong. The Race to Paddington is of the utmost interest!
The two competitors are James Jimmy Anderson and Stuart Broady Broad. The race they don’t know they are running is to become the very first English Paddington.
What the hell am I talking about? Well, apart from being a major London railway interchange and a marmalade-loving bear, Paddington is the term – invented by L. Herringshaw of York – for a Test match bowler claiming one hundred wickets by lbw. A ton of padding. You get the gist.
There have been ten Paddingtons in the history of men’s Test cricket so far. Three of them are Indian, three of them Sri Lankan, two are Australian, and two Pakistani. See if you can guess them all – I’ll tell you for nothing that the most recent man to join the list was Ravichandran Ashwin. None of them, though, are English. Until now…
For – would you believe it? – after a billion Test wickets each, James Jimmy Anderson and Stuart Broady Broad are both sitting pretty on 97 lbws. Three upheld appeals this summer, and one of them will make the international first eleven, and take the Race to Paddington. But which will it be?
This is where some number-crunching is required. Or some toe-crunching, perhaps. Of the existing Paddingtons, the bowler with the highest percentage of lbws is Waqar Younis, with 29.5% of his Test dismissals, followed closely by Wasim Akram, on 28.7%. The most mediocre Paddington was Muttiah Muralidaran, who only took 18.8% of his wickets this way.
Of those bowlers who never quite made it to Paddington, my favourite is Terry Alderman. The Aussie firebrand took more than a third of his 170 Test wickets – 34.1% - lbw, by becoming "a dealer in slowish-medium swingers which darted in and out like striking snakes."
Perhaps James Jimmy Anderson and Stuart Broady Broad need to add slowish striking snakes to their repertoire, as they turn out to be even worse at lbws than Murali. Only one in six of Stuart Broady Broad’s Test dismissals were lbw; just one in seven of James Jimmy Anderson’s. On that basis, Stuart Broady Broad will need to take 18 more wickets to become Paddington, and James Jimmy Anderson 21.
So, Stuart Broady Broad is the slight favourite to win the Race to Paddington, and there is an ideal scenario in which he wins does it during the Ashes. This involves him pinning David Warner in front. Why Mr Warner, I hear you ask? Because the Australian batter hails from the eastern Sydney suburb of…Paddington!
And if that hasn’t whetted your appetite for Friday’s first Test, I really don’t know what will.
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| I thank you. |
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