New Zealand's remarkable consistency under McCullum

New Zealand have traditionally had reasonable bowlers and not very good batsmen.

Even New Zealand's best batsmen, Crowe, Reid, Turner and Sutcliffe didn't manage to hold the team together often enough for New Zealand to regularly score big scores.

Before the year 2000 New Zealand had only managed to pass 400 on 52 occasions. (roughly 10% of innings). From 2000 until the end of 2012, they managed to pass 400 on 32 occasions (roughy 17% of innings). Since then, under Brendon McCullum, they have managed to pass 400 on 12 occasions in 32 innings (37.5%).

The consistency has been remarkable.

Under McCullum New Zealand have scored under 200 in 27% of innings. The next best was Fleming with 29.3%. Under every other captain who had the team for at least 5 matches, New Zealand scored less than 200 on at least one third of their innings.

This graphic displays the difference quite well:

Under McCullum, New Zealand have scored over 400 more often than they scored over 300 with most captains.

The team's ability to score 400 regularly is actually impressive when compared globally also.

I decided to look at how often a team scored 400, divided by the number of times they were bowled out.  This eliminates situations where the match situation makes scoring 400 unrealistic, for example where a team scores 90/3 to win a match or declares for 385/7 to set up a win.

Here's the table:

Captain	400's	All Outs	400s per AO
DG Bradman	16	21	0.762
SR Waugh	36	56	0.643
AJ Strauss	27	47	0.574
MJK Smith	11	21	0.524
SC Ganguly	27	52	0.519
RT Ponting	45	89	0.506
SM Gavaskar	21	42	0.5
BB McCullum	12	24	0.5
Imran Khan	20	41	0.488
Mushtaq Mohammad	9	20	0.45
GC Smith	50	112	0.446
MS Dhoni	33	76	0.434
MS Atapattu	9	21	0.429
Waqar Younis	9	21	0.429
SM Pollock	11	26	0.423
N Kapil Dev	15	36	0.417
DPMD Jayawardene	17	42	0.405
MJ Clarke	18	45	0.4
WM Woodfull	12	30	0.4

Some other New Zealand names on the list are Fleming, 0.298; Vettori 0.214 and Howarth 0.212.

It is still very early days, but this New Zealand team under Brendon McCullum are starting to show some real promise.