Singapore v Bahrain at Singapore, ICC World Cricket League Division Five

Today, Kevin Pietersen hit a marvelous century for England to successfully lead their chase against Pakistan in Dubai.

It was his second ODI century in as many matches.

Over on Twitter, I opined that maybe, just maybe, KP was not a big game player. That in ODIs specifically, he didn’t come through when England needed him most: In the World Cup.

This is similar to the knock that most people had on Alex Rodriguez until 2010.

Great all season, but crap in October.

I have always thought it was a bit unfair to criticize players based on such small samples sizes, but I thought it might make for an interesting blog post.

KP’s career ODI average is 41.84 in 116 innings.  In World Cups, his average is 47.91 in 13 innings.

Again, a small sample size, but it looks as if my tweet might have been off base a bit.

However, I was referring more to the 2011 World Cup and its relation to the UAE One Day Interationals. In the former, he averaged just 32.75 in four innings; while in the latter he averaged 70.25 in the same number of innings.

So while my tweet was not incorrect, per se, it was off base, as KP had himself a monster World Cup in 2007.

And so I decided to look at more players in a similar manner.

The top ten World Cup batsmen based on average runs scored (minimum 10 innings) are as follows:

In all One Day Internationals, here are the best batsmen based on average (minimum 40 innings):

Only one player shows up on both lists: the incomparable Sir Viv Richards, widely considered the best ODI batsman in history.

I then expanded it to a 100 innings minimum:

Now three players appear on both lists: Michael Clarke, Viv Richards, and Sachin Tendulkar.

It is a bit of a stretch, and a bit meaningless, but those are three batsmen who best exemplify “clutch” batting as well as long term brilliance.

But I bet you could have told me that without spending 45 minutes with Statsguru.

Until next time.