Clash Of The Titans

Over the late 90s and early 2000s, Australia was invincible with esteemed players like the Waugh brothers, Ricky Ponting, Matthew Hayden, Darren Lehmann, Brett Lee amongst other greats. Their batting line-up was definitely the one to beat. If one batter failed, the other one rose to the occasion.

Ricky Ponting goes down as one of Australia’s greatest players ever. With a career average of 51.85 in Tests and being the most successful captain in Test history, this Tasmanian has a highly celebrated career of 17 years. He’s held the title of Mr. Dependable for the longest time.

His teammate of many years, Matthew Hayden is one of the most aggressive and powerful players we’ve seen in this sport. This Australian Cricket Hall Of Fame member averaged 50.73 in Tests and holds the highest individual score by an Australian player in Tests (380).

When these two players were at their prime, I was a young kid, not smart enough to understand the beautiful game of cricket so I decided to look back and study they’ve played their parts in taking the team to victory. I studied the performance of Ricky Ponting and Matthew Hayden along with 3 of their fine contemporaries- Justin Langer, Steve Waugh and Adam Gilchrist in all Test matches played between 2000 and 2003. I did an individual analysis of how Punter performed versus the combined averages of the other 4 top batsmen followed by a similar analysis for Haydos. For this analysis, I considered the average first innings score only to eliminate the discrepancies due to various instances where the batsmen did not bat in the second innings.

Out of the 41 matches that Ponting played across those few years, his average was 73.05 and the combined mean of other 4 was 55.55 runs. Ponting’s average was more than his teammates’ average in 21 of those matches i.e 51% of the times. On more than half of the occasions, Ponting is seen taking his team over the line with his tremendous efforts. Furthermore, in 12 of those matches, Ponting averaged 50+ more runs than the others.

Hayden played 42 matches and averaged 66.71 while his peers held a combined average of 57.77. He had a higher average than the others 45% of the times i.e 19 matches. 52% of the times, the difference margin was 50 or more runs. 

By taking a threshold of 50 runs, we can assume that the batsman under study played a better inning or a match-winning inning in unfavourable conditions where other batsmen of great talent failed to do so.

Player	Average > others	Margin > 50
Ricky Ponting	51.22%	57.14%
Matthew Hayden	45.23%	52.63%

We can establish by looking at this comparison that Ponting has proved himself to be the better one at few more opportunities than Hayden. Surely, the two have the same career averages and Hayden has a strike rate much higher than that of Ponting but Ponting has proved his adroitness of sticking around to get the favourable result. 

Data source: https://stats.espncricinfo.com/ci/engine/records/team/match_results_year.html?class=1;id=2;type=team