India vs Bangladesh

As I write this India are 129/1 off 20.

They have made a great start, but does this mean that they will finish the innings well? In the last few years, India have had difficulty finishing off the first innings as well as they have started it.

As I mentioned in the last post, over the last 2 years India have not scored more (when batting first in an official, non-rain interrupted match) in the last 20 overs in any match than they scored in the first 30. Most teams do this about once every 5 or 6 matches.

This can also be shown by how much more contribution India gets from their top order. One useful stat is a batsman's effectiveness rating. This was thought up by someone at Cricinfo a while ago, and I really like it as a way of comparing batsmen. It is effectively a way of combining the strike rate and the average. Basically it's runs squared divided by balls multiplied by wickets. It means that someone who averages 50 at a strike rate of 75 gets an effectiveness rate of 37.5, while a player with an average of 42 with a strike rate of 90 would have a rate of 37.8. These two players would be valued similarly by a lot of fans (although probably with a lot of debate about who was better), and their effectiveness ratings show this.

If we look at the last 2 years, and break things down by batting position, here is India vs the rest of the World:

Position	World effectiveness	India effectiveness	ratio
1-2	27.831	38.77	1.39
3-5	26.31	35.19	1.34
6-8	20.54	24.98	1.22
9-11	8.77	6.14	0.70

As you can see India start off much better than the rest of the world, but then drop away significantly. It will be interesting to see if this trend continues, or if they start to finish innings off well, as they have shown they can in the practice matches.