Potential Match-Losing Innings

How disastrous are they for teams?

The concept of a ‘match-losing innings’ is often thrown around by people on social media, and occasionally (and increasingly so) by some of the stronger commentators on TV. It’s an unusual concept for traditionalists to get their head around, because match-losing innings (so called because of the slow pace of them) don’t really exist in Test cricket, save for the odd slow innings which pushes back the timing of a declaration.

However, in T20 cricket, resource management is key. Each team has a maximum of 120 balls and 10 wickets in hand to score as many runs as possible. A 30 ball innings from a player, for example, is 1/4 of a teams ball resources - and high or low performance in these 30 balls can have a huge impact on their teams expected win percentage.

Trying to quantify a match-losing innings can be tricky. A player playing a 30(30) innings batting first is going to have a lot more negative implications for their team than 30(30) batting second in a low chase - for example, for a team chasing 125 it’s basically a neutral innings from a scoring perspective and probably a positive by allowing players to bat around them. So, there has to be differentiation between batting first and batting second.

I also call these innings potential match-losing innings in this article, because even bad innings (like a team making generally bad decisions) can still end up on the winning side on some occasions. Generally speaking, having looked at the instances of where this happened, the player playing such an innings was bailed out by one or more of their team mates playing an ultra-high strike rate innings, or by one of their bowlers who ran through the opposition’s batting. However, it should be clear that even in these cases, there is a high likelihood that the player’s innings in question hampered the chances of their team winning the match at the time that their innings was constructed.

For the purposes of this article, I looked at the IPL in 2022, and among top 7 batters combined in winning teams batting first, players averaged 33.66 with a strike rate of 148.26. I then applied a 20% strike rate tolerance level for a match-losing innings batting first, which created a level where I would classify an innings as being potentially match-losing. The chart below shows an example of 15+ balls faced expectations - of course this can be continued for longer innings as well:-

So, for example, a 30 ball innings batting first would need to yield fewer than 35.58 runs in order to be considered a potentially match-losing innings (although it would be 14.48 runs below winrate run expectations). I also only looked at innings where the batter faced 15 balls or more.

What were the results?

First innings - 59 outcomes of potentially match-losing innings during a team’s first innings according to the above criteria were recorded. 20 (33.9%) of their teams won the match, so immediately we can see that innings which fell into the criteria used were extremely negative towards their team’s chances of winning the match.

These numbers adequately illustrate the high-risk nature of playing slow starting innings (either with or without the intention of trying to catch up later on in an innings). It also shows that trying to slowly rebuild a team’s poor start is a totally unviable strategy - there were quite a few examples of these and they pretty much always put their team in even greater trouble.

Which players played the innings with the lowest expectation in their teams first innings? You might be surprised at some of the names on this list…