An average, every single time.

Shahid Afridi at No6 is the icing on the cake. In terms of index values, he is the best player in the Pakistan team.

Is this a valid conclusion? Certainly. A career average strike rate of 117 means that he scores his average 22 runs in 1■ balls,

Since he normally walks in after the 40th over, this average means that the team scores around 40 runs in six overs every single time. This is the value Afridi and other 110plus BSR batsmen bring to the table.

West Indies – 1991 (ODI #675)

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We are now three decades back and the change is clear. The top four batsmen have strike rates in the 60s. And nos. 6 and 7 have strike rates in the 70s. Barring Desmond Haynes and Gordon Greenidge, it has no great WRPI values either. However, the one batsman who makes the huge difference is the king, Viv Richards. His numbers would prove great even today. His index value of 3■.6 gives some respectability to the West won many matches for Sri Lanka. Once more, I suggest that readers move the goalposts. Today’s cameo is 30 in 15. During the 19■0s and ’90s, a 20 in 15 was good.

Conclusion

This English team is a very strong side and could improve further. However, once India gets its middle order settled, there is going to be a fight for the top spot.

This is a first level analysis. What are the ways in which this analysis can be improved?

The most obvious change is to take the careertodate values instead of career values. This would mean that the same group of seven batsmen could present different BSI values for the initial 40 years or so. However, the benefit is that each program run would not produce different BSI values for current teams. Another possibility is to introduce recent form, say, for the last 10 matches or so, into the analysis.

Finally, the weight could be changed to, say, 60:40 in favour of the WRPI against the current split of 50:50.