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A boy has been batting for hours on the sun-baked maidan, oblivious to the chaotic symphony of the megacity around him. No sightscreen, no boundary rope. Just a twenty-two-yard stretch of bare earth, worn to dust by a queue of bowlers who will not stop coming. Off-spinners, leg-spinners, a quick off five paces. The ball keeps low. It grips and spits past the splice. And he learns to play it late, with soft hands and a still head, through the 5am sessions before school, wanting to earn a cap for his country.
That boy grows up, earns that cap and carries that method into Test cricket, one built for the accumulation of runs at home, perfected over the thousands of balls he faced on the maidans. And by the measure cricket has trusted most, the batting average, it works.
Then he goes to England. Or Australia, or South Africa, where the ball does everything it never did on the maidan. The runs dry up. He is hardly the first: as a group, subcontinental batsmen average 45 at home and 33 in SENA (South Africa, England, New Zealand and Australia). The conventional reading is the obvious one: a fine player, found out by the moving ball, like so many before him.
That reading counts his runs. It never asks what they were worth.
And what they were worth runs the other way. The runs these batters score in SENA are fewer, but each one is worth more than the runs they pile up at home, because they come in the moments that decide Tests: a collapse to steady, a new ball to survive, a match hanging in the balance. The average counts every run the same. So it buries their most valuable innings inside their least impressive numbers.
To measure that, each run is scored not by the scoreboard but by how much it shifted its team’s chances of winning the match, then weighted by the difficulty of the situation it was made in: the state of the pitch, the depth of the trouble, how far the game hung in the balance, and how much of the scoring the batter was carrying alone. Those weighted runs are its value. A big hundred on a flat pitch in a match already won can be worth less than its runs. A defiant seventy in a collapse can be worth far more.
Take two of Cheteshwar Pujara’s innings. At home against New Zealand in 2012 he made 159, coming in at 50 for 1 with the pitch flat and the platform laid, in a match India won by an innings. It is worth 128, below the runs themselves. At Adelaide in 2018 he made 123, walking in at the end of the second over with India one down for next to nothing, against Starc, Hazlewood and Cummins, and batted through the day for a total of 250. India won by 31 runs, and Pujara was Man of the Match. That innings is worth 288. ESPNcricinfo named it their Test batting performance of the year. The scorecard makes the 159 the larger score. Only one of them decided a Test.
Boxing Day, 2018, Centurion. A pitch for the seamers, and 15 wickets fell on the first day. Pakistan were four down by lunch, Duanne Olivier steaming through the top order. But Babar Azam was once that boy too, out on the streets of Firdous Market in Lahore facing a taped-up tennis ball, the hard ground skidding it through low, a boy off a short run bending his back to hurry it past the splice. Now he stood on the other side of the world from those streets, the ball climbing and leaving where the tape-ball had once scuttled, and one of the finest attacks in the game tearing his team apart around him. He went the other way. It was Steyn he chose, ten fours off the great fast bowler, 71 of a total of 181 before the tail gave out. It is his most valuable innings away from home, at 287, and it is not close.
Mohammad Rizwan averages 40.5 in the subcontinent and 41.1 in SENA. The same batter, by the batting average. He fails no more abroad than at home, yet his runs there are worth more. His 171 against Bangladesh, on a flattening Rawalpindi pitch in a match Pakistan lost by ten wickets, is worth below its runs, at 157. His most valuable SENA scores run the other way. A 72 in England worth 183. A 95 in Australia worth 180. An 88, again in Australia, worth 164. All of them more than his 171 at home.
Take all 49 subcontinental batters with at least a dozen Test innings in each, and nearly all face the same way: cattle pulled by a magnetic field they can’t see. Three stand sideways. Their runs are worth more per run in the subcontinent than in SENA.
Fewer runs, each worth more
Value per run at home against in SENA, for 49 batters from India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh with at least twelve Test innings in both.
Above the dashed line, a batter's runs are worth more per run in SENA than at home. Forty-six of forty-nine sit above it. Hover any dot for the detail; the three exceptions are labelled.
This could just be what fewer runs do. But SENA batters average 15% less touring the subcontinent, and the value of their runs does not move. Subcontinental batters average 28% less in SENA, and their value per run climbs by nearly a quarter.
The innings that survive tend to come in the worst moments: walking out into a collapse, against a fired-up attack with the ball still moving, the match getting away. The same conditions that empty the average are the ones that fill these innings with meaning.
Whenever one of them walks out at Lord’s against a moving ball he was never raised facing, the averages will read leaner and the failures plainer. But it is exactly then, in the innings that survive, that his runs are worth the most. And it is exactly then that the average records them as the same plain number as all the rest.