New Zealand captain Brendon McCullum. Photo / Brett Phibbs
Here's what you need to know about the evolution of batting in one-day cricket: in the first match in World Cup history, England scored a sprightly 334-6 in their 60 overs; legendary Indian opener Sunil Gavaskar then scored 36 not out in 174 balls as India reached 132-3 in response. Strike rates weren't the be-all and end-all of batting back then but, still, Gavaskar's strike rate of 20.69 is eye-watering.
Wrote former England player Tony Lewis in The Cricketer: "Dejected Indians ran on to the field, pathetically pleading with him to die fighting. Their flags hung limp in their hands. It was a perverse moment of self-inflicted shame."
The Indian manager, Gulabai Ramchand, felt compelled to issue a statement after the match stating that Gavaskar had considered the score unobtainable and had taken practice.
Gavaskar was a famously cussed individual during his playing days, but consider that for a moment: India decided that a run rate of 5.56 per over was unobtainable. Now look at what happened in Nelson on Monday week ago: Ireland, an associate nation, chased down a target of 305 in 50 overs against the winners of the first two World Cups, the West Indies. They did it with 25 balls to spare!
The Gavaskar case was an outlier, but no one would dispute the fact that run rates have increased over the years, but we are as interested in the patterns behind the increases. To that end we have mapped the run rates of the seven countries that have played in every World Cup - Australia, England, India, New Zealand, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and West Indies.
The reasons for run-rate increases are many and varied. Most commentary curmudgeons fall back on the twin pillars of smaller boundaries and bigger bats. These play a part, but can't come close to explaining it all. There are many stories, from days of lore, of the likes of Keith Miller and Garry Sobers hitting the ball across three postcodes, so while no doubt bats have got bigger and lighter, hits haven't necessarily got longer.
In fact, both players and bat manufacturers have aggressively downplayed the significance of the willow in response to ICC chief executive Dave Richardson signalling that bat sizes would be looked at in the future.
"Where some batsmen are mishitting balls and it is just carrying over the rope and going for a six instead of being caught at the boundary; that is what some cricket people believe has become unfair," Richardson said.
"The [lawmakers] will be looking at giving perhaps some consideration to placing limitations on the depth of a bat in particular."
That bought a swift response, with bat-makers pointing out other reasons and former Australian test opener Ed Cowan said that bats have changed maybe "five per cent in 10 years but [were an] easy target to blame".
As an exercise, I drew up a list of "fors" on an A4 sheet of paper. These were a list of popular reasons, other than big bats, behind the explosion of runs. Nearly every "for" had a compelling counter-argument.
FOR: Smaller boundariesWell, yes, most grounds have got smaller, though in cases like the side boundaries at Adelaide Oval, they are significantly larger. Pukekura Park, New Plymouth, was the only ground used in 1992 that surrendered 300-plus totals, and that's not being used this time around. Grounds like Saxton Oval and Hagley Park are much bigger than the likes of Lancaster Park and Carisbrook. Also, bigger grounds might mean fewer boundaries, but they are far easier to score twos and threes upon.
FOR: More muscular batsmen
You can say the same for bowlers, who are fitter and breaking down less often than they were 10 years ago, and fielders too.
FOR: Fielding restrictions
These have been tinkered with over the years to the point now where you can never have more than four fielders outside the 30m circle. That makes covering the boundaries more difficult, but is balanced by the fact that fielders are far more athletic and brilliant than they used to be.
FOR: Detailed video analysis of bowlers' habits and weaknesses.
You could just as easily say, ditto for batsmen.
FOR: The white balls stay harder longer as two of them are in use.
This also means batting is theoretically more difficult at the start of the innings, because the ball stays swinging for longer.
FOR:A wider variety of shots, including scoops, ramps and reverses.
Very true, but bowlers have an astonishing array of variations, too, including cross-seamers, slower balls, slower-ball bouncers, wide yorkers and more leeway for short-pitched bowling than they used to.
On the surface it makes little sense to suggest a third of the game, bowling, would develop more slowly from a technical and strategic standpoint than batting or fielding. Every team has a flotilla of coaches and at least one of those coaches is employed to work with bowlers. But this is what master batsman Martin Crowe suggested, with his usual persuasiveness, in a recent column.
"Bowlers are now cannon fodder," he wrote in Cricinfo. "They were once the controllers, the scene setters. Alas, they have become poor cousins in a game where administrators want boundaries struck between every heartbeat.
"Over time, the bowler has lost his confidence. With the small boundaries positioned, cruel field restrictions adopted, and [big bats] in full force, the bowler hasn't a hope. To his credit, he has tried his best to produce multiple clever and skilful variations to compete. The overriding problem here is, most bowlers are now trying to use them all, and have become masters of none."
Again, while all these points have validity, they can be countered or at least minimised.
There has to be something deeper and I believe it is what data analysts would describe as an immeasurable.
It's attitude.
At its simplest, batsmen are no longer as afraid of failure. If there was one statistic that held back one-day cricket more than any other it was a batsman's average. It was the be-all and end-all of a career - how they were measured against peers.
Somewhere along the line, somebody clever realised that average was only as important as strike rate, the amount of runs a batsman scored every 100 balls. And then somebody even cleverer realised that even strike rates were a little misleading. For example: a batsman that scores slowly at the start before blossoming late in his innings, may end up with a good strike rate, but how harmful was his slow start to those he was batting with? Did all the dot balls he soaked up early in his innings contribute to his partner being dismissed while trying to force the pace?
So coaches and analysts now treat strike rate and average as just part of the deal. What they're more interested in is situational hitting. Each batsman has a role to play depending on the time and context of his innings.
As a loose example, a quick-fire 30 off 24 balls from a No6 who has entered the fray in the 37th over, is far more useful in most situations than 40 off 40, because an average hitter at the end of the innings would be expected to score more than 10 runs off the additional 16 balls he has used up. In the same way, a first-ball duck, while embarrassing, at least doesn't clog up the innings like a Gavaskarian ordeal.
(As another illustration of how attitudes have changed, consider one of New Zealand's most famous and lauded one-day innings - Bruce Edgar's 102 not out against Australia in the "Underarm" match. Chasing 235 on an admittedly low and slow pitch, New Zealand, with a strong batting tail, were at various points 172-4 and 221-5 and yet still needed 15 off the last over with four wickets in hand. This isn't to diminish what was then considered a fantastic knock, but these days Edgar's 141-ball century would come in for a storm of scrutiny.)
Because a batsman is not beholden to his average any longer, they have learned to embrace failure. This is a massive mindset shift that T20, which has been blamed for everything from the death of the forward defence to the hole in the ozone layer, has been partly responsible for.
Coaches and selectors have gotten smarter. They don't care much for milestones (a batsman that fluffs around going from 90 to 100 is more likely to be criticised than congratulated) if they impinge on a team target. They know failure is an ever-present in cricket. One of the most popular fall-backs for batsmen is that even Sir Donald Bradman failed once every three times he batted (which is in itself a dodgy stat: if you consider being dismissed for anything less than 20 a failure for a top-order bat, which seems about reasonable, then he actually failed just 22 times in 80 test innings).
Batsmen are allowed to miss out without fear that they will be sacrificed on a selector's altar.
Take New Zealand captain Brendon McCullum as an example. Mike Hesson and Edgar, New Zealand's coach-selector and head of selection respectively, know that playing the way he does, McCullum is going to fail... a lot. They also know that when he comes off he is capable of winning games almost single-handedly. As a situational hitter at the top of the innings - and with sufficient roundheads below him in the order - he is a luxury worth having.
Safe in that knowledge, he bats without fear, as does David Warner, or Glenn Maxwell, or Suresh Raina, or Corey Anderson. (In countries where there is a still a more kneejerk reaction to selection - think England - they seem to develop less of these devil-may-care players.)
This, ultimately, is the main reason behind the rapid increase in run rates. Big, thick bats don't swing themselves. Bowlers and particularly fielders are getting better, not worse. Cricket has always had small grounds, big grounds and middle-sized grounds. But batsmen haven't always been so brazen - that is the biggest difference of all.
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The White Ferns have remarkably reached the final.