Comparing Sandeep Lamichhane’s Twenty 20 stats with other prominent leggies

Surely the name “Sandeep Lamichhane” needs no introduction. He has been making waves in the Twenty 20 cricketing world by delivering outstanding performances in the IPL, Big Bash and other international T20 leagues. However, I wanted to take a look at how exactly Sandeep has been faring compared with some other legendary leg-spinners and his contemporaries.

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All of the data were collected from Cricinfo.com and after meticulous cleaning of the data, here are the findings. The bowlers in the list are : Shane Warne, Anil Kumble, Rashid Khan, Yuzvendra Chahal, Amit Mishra, Imran Tahir, Adam Zampa, Adil Rashid, Rashid Khan and Sandeep Lamichhane.

Matches played:

Total number of matches played

Sandeep is relatively very new to the realm of T20 leagues and comparatively has played much fewer games compared to others. Anil Kumble and Shane Warne are the only two former players in the list, but even they have played more than Sandeep. Sandeep is likely to catch up to these two legends though.

Some of the key indicators to judge a bowlers ability in T20 cricket are the

• Economy rate: The average number of runs conceded per over in cricket.
• Bowling Strike rate: Measurement of a bowler’s average number of balls bowled for every wicket taken.
• Average: is the number of runs they have conceded per wicket taken.

However, it is widely recognized that such statistics have severe limitations in assessing the true abilities of a player’s performance [1]. Therefore, we will be looking at the measure called Combined Bowling Rate(CBR) as developed by Lemmer. [2] CBR was constructed by using the harmonic mean of A, E and S. For calculation purposes it can be written as:[3]

CBR Formula

One of the limitation we would be facing was the variable value if the number of overs bowled were small. However, in our case all the bowlers have bowled enough overs and we likely need not worry about the few overs limitations.

Total number of overs bowled

Using the CBR we can get a good overview of Sandeep’s performance.

CBR Vs Economy:

CBR vs Economy rate

We can observe that based on economy Sandeep is fourth on the list. However, if we take a look at the CBR which according to the earlier cited works is a better measure for performance, we can see that Sandeep jumps to the third position only behind Rashid Khan, and Imran Tahir.

Judging by both the CBR score and the economy rate we can see that Sandeep has been successful in his short stint as a T20 bowler.

Surprise finding: It was rather interesting to see Shane Warne go to the bottom of this list. A case can be made for him though: the champion spinner was in the latter part of his career and therefore wasn’t at his supreme best.

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References:

1. Lewis, A. J. Towards fairer measures of player performance in one-day cricket. _Journal of the Operational Research Society._2005, 56 : 804–815.
2. Lemmer, H. H. The combined bowling rate as a measure of bowling performance in cricket. South African Journal for Research in Sport, Physical Education and Recreation. 2002, 24 (2): 37–44.
3. Lemmer, H. H, Perspectives on the use of the Combined Bowling Rate in Cricket. International Journal of Sports Science & Coaching Volume 9 · Number 3 · 2014, 513–523
4. Bhattacharjee D, Pahinkar D. G, Analysis of Performance of Bowlers using Combined Bowling Rate, International Journal of Sports Science and Engineering Vol. 06 (2012) №03, pp. 184–192