Have Pakistani Test Openers Always Struggled?

Pakistan's recent loss in Manchester highlighted a number of the team's shortcomings. From dropped catches by the Pakistani side to a high English run rate the differences between the two teams was clear. For me, the most striking difference was in the performance of the opening batsmen. With England's opening pair, Cook and Hales, scoring a combined total of 316 runs compared with Hafeez and Masood's 171 in the first two tests of the Investec series, our openers have struggled to produce runs. Frustrated by this trait in many recent Pakistani test squads, in this article I analyze the long term trend performance of Pakistani openers and find that, since the combination of Aamir Sohail and Saeed Anwar, they have experienced a steady decline in their run scoring ability while most of their opponents have significantly improved theirs ¹.

Figure 1: Average Runs Scored by First or Second Batsman in Test Cricket

Using data from Cricinfo's Statsguru figure 1 plots the average runs scored by either the first or second batsman for Pakistan and six other test playing nations that have test records at least as long as Pakistan's ². The trend decline in the performance of Pakistani openers is immediately clear. Indeed, Pakistani openers in 2016 score around 7 fewer runs than they did in 2000. While this may seem small the analogous measure for the Australian, Indian, English and South African squad displays the opposite trend. For example, Indian openers have steadily improved their average of around 33 in 2000 to 43 in 2016. These trends have resulted in Pakistani openers being ranked near the bottom, a stark contrast to their ranking in the late 90s and early 2000s. Currently, Pakistani test openers comfortably out-perform only the New Zealand top order who have been historically low scorers and also feature a declining trend in average runs scored. More recently, the retirement of legendary openers such as Graeme Smith (South Africa), Matthew Hayden (Australia) and Andrew Strauss (England) has made Pakistani openers more competitive.

While it is useful to consider the aggregate average it is also instructive to study these same figures by opponent. Figure 2 shows the average runs scored by either opening batsmen from 2000 to 2016 against each one of the eight other test playing nations. Since 2000, the Pakistani top order has performed best against Bangladesh and worst against England. The figure also shows the analogous runs scored by the opponent's top order against Pakistan. With the exception of Bangladesh, Zimbabwe and the West Indies our opponent's openers easily out-perform our own top order, with the largest relative performance gap occurring when playing against India and England. So, while Pakistan has long prided itself on it's crack bowling attack it appears as though our opponent's bowlers are much better at managing our openers than we can manage theirs.

Figure 2: Avg. Runs Scored by First or Second Opener by Opponent

Finally, I consider the performance of individual players; the left panel of figure 3 shows the average runs scored by those openers who have opened at least 12 times (innings) for Pakistan since 2000. The restricted sample includes 11 players with the highest and lowest average score belonging to Saeed Anwar and Saleem Elahi respectively. The current openers Shan Masood and Mohammad Hafeez are featured on opposite end of the runs distribution with Masood scoring around 10 fewer runs than Hafeez on average. 

Given the tendency of openers to score both very high and very low scores I also report a measure of consistency ³ for each player in the right panel of figure . Somewhat surprisingly, Shahid Afridi has been the most consistent test opener for Pakistan with a score of at least 30 (around his average) in 8 of his 16 turns as a test opener. The current opening pair feature a similar and moderate level of consistency to each other, although Hafeez has many more test openings under his belt . The least consistent opener since 2000 has been Khuram Manzoor who failed to reach double digits half of the time and scoring at least a half century 20 percent of the time he opened.

Figure 3: Individual Openers in Test Cricket since 2000

Taken together, these data give me cause to be hopeful. While there is no doubt that our openers are currently struggling to perform they also remind me that this was not always the case. As Hafeez's average inches closer to Anwar's one can only hope Masood's recent replacement can follow suit. Of course openers do not play the game alone, fielders and bowlers have an equal responsibility to decrease the runs of our opponent's openers, but that's a whole 'nother story.

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^{1. While the focus here is on test cricket performing an analogous analysis on One Day International (ODI) batting records yields qualitatively similar results.↩}

^{2. Data was extracted from on July 29th 2016. Given the inherent volatility of the underlying data, figure 1 is smoothed using 10 year moving-averages. Note that these figures report only those runs scored when batting at either number 1 or 2 in the order.↩}

^{3. This measure is the ratio of the median and mean runs scored by each player. ↩}