Five centuries in 24 hours: Glenn Maxwell's knock reflects change in limited-overs batting, fitness may decide success at World Cup

24 hours; 5 international centuries, all scored at a breakneck pace. There are some similarities in these innings but there’s one that stands out, as a picture of the future of big innings. The first of the five was Glenn Maxwell’s 113* (55) vs India at Bengaluru. A few minutes later, half a world away, Jos Butler brought up his hundred in Grenada. He would go on to score 150 (77). Eoin Morgan started batting before either Maxwell or Buttler, but his hundred came up a couple of minutes after Buttler’s. He scored 103 off 88 balls. Chris Gayle was the next to bring up the milestone, also in Grenada ending with 162 (97) that looked for a while like it was going to be a match-winning effort. The fifth centurion was Tamim Iqbal. While his was in a Test match, he still scored at roughly a-run-a-ball. He ended up with 126 (128). Tamim and Gayle both got off to a quick start then slowed down. In contrast, Buttler and Morgan were both quite slow to start, then accelerated dramatically. Maxwell kept a fairly consistent pace throughout his innings.

It is expected that Maxwell would score faster, followed by Buttler, Morgan and Gayle and then Tamim because of the fact that Maxwell was playing a T20 while the three in Grenada were playing a One Day International and Tamim was in a Test. However, looking at them in context of the highest scores in their respective formats over the past 12 months, we can see all of them, with the possible exception of Morgan, scored remarkably quickly for their format.

One thing that can be quite informative when looking at an innings is looking at how the runs are scored, not just how many. One way to do that is to break it down into what’s known as the activity rate and the boundary rate. The activity rate is how many runs were scored off the balls that were not hit for a 4 or 6. The boundary rate is what percentage of deliveries were hit for a 4 or 6. Using these metrics it’s possible to compare the five innings against the others from the same format. The graphs below show this.

Maxwell scored his runs at a strike rate of almost 80 even if you remove the boundaries. That’s close to double what any of the others did. One of the trends that’s been happening in one day cricket since the introduction of T20 is an increase in the activity rate. It used to be fairly uncommon for batsmen to have an activity rate above 0.45 whereas now the median is close to 0.55. Buttler, Gayle and Morgan all had an activity rate close to 0.5, the difference of their scoring rate came from how often they hit boundaries. Gayle hit more than a quarter of the deliveries he faced for 4 or 6 but Buttler hit almost one-third. Some of that may be down to the relatively short boundaries and quick outfield in Grenada. There weren’t many twos run by anyone because the ball either went for 1 or 4. Morgan was very good at turning over the strike off the spinners whereas he picked up the amount of boundaries he scored once the quick bowlers came on at the death. Buttler really accelerated well at the end. Off the spinners he was prepared to just work the ball around but at the death he really started to accelerate against the pace bowlers. He was on 45 off 44 balls. He scored 105 runs off the next 33 balls. One thing to note from Maxwell’s innings was that he scored at a similar activity rate to the spin bowlers and the quick bowlers - close to 0.8 for both of them. However, his boundary rate was twice as high against the fast bowlers as it was against the spinners, and so he had a higher strike rate against the quicks. In some ways, Maxwell’s innings is a sign of what’s to come in one day cricket. He scored quickly without taking a huge number of risks by constantly looking for one whenever a boundary wasn’t on offer. This is the sort of change that’s been happening in one day cricket without us really noticing. On some of the larger grounds in England, we may well still see very large scores as batsman run a lot of ones and twos. The approach of Gayle to stand and swing is effective on small grounds but the more active approach of Maxwell may well be a better one for the larger grounds. One thing that a high activity rate requires however, is improved fitness. The emphasis that India and New Zealand (in particular) have placed on improving players’ fitness may well see those two teams being more successful at the World Cup than other teams that have focused purely on hitting ability.