by sussexpob » Mon Aug 31, 2020 11:00 am
Again, like I said with his 50 over output, you cant look at a guys stats and compare them with his peers without narrowing down those stats specifically to what can be achieved by people asked to mirror his role in the side. Its easy to look at Moeen and say 'well he averages 15, which is terrible compared to x,y,z' but how many of these batsman are coming in most of the time at 7? You can only really compare Moeen to those 7s. England's current average 5 wicket drop occurs on ball 5 of the 18th over, going on their RR and net averages in the last 5 years. Which means that the 7 has roughly 7 balls per match to bat out. Moeen averages 8.6 balls per innings at 7, so the expectation and actual seems about right.
At this point what he averages means pretty much zero. Its all about SR, how many he can score. Very rarely is a T20 team bowled out, so he just needs to hit out. And if we compare Moeen's SR to those achieved by other teams past the point of that 5th wicket falling, you find only NZ as a team have a SR over 130 (Moeen is 131 at this point)..... after Englands team effort of 126SR, no team passes 120. So in actual fact, Moeens ability to hit at the end of an innings is a significant advantage at the end over pretty much anything that most teams can achieve.
Then you look at his bowling. The current 5 year average when you remove all the minnows and keep what Id consider the core 9 test teams performance, the average econ rate over 20 overs is 8.2. Moeen manages 8.57, which is above average. But then again you would expect a 5th bowler/all rounder to perform worse than specialists. And England also dont exactly have a great bowling attack, so you have to compare him to other England bowlers to see if he get into the team.
Englands average econ rate is 8.64.... so Moeen is below the average for the team. Comparing him to those currently in the team;
Curran - 9.25
Mahmood - 10.92
Rashid - 7.5
Jordan - 8.79
Gregory - 7.3* ( Only bowled in 3 out of 7 possible innings. As the second batting allrounder, his SR is 104 in 7 games and average of 5, which is drastically lower than Moeen)
Out of players who might be expected to play in a full strength squad
Stokes - 8.82
Wood - 9.67
Archer - 7.25 ( only one game)
So its hard to see from an all round perspective who exactly has the capacity to replace him. Hes better than most bowling options in econ, and about as good a 7 in terms of what he can do than most in world cricket.
The key is form. At the moment its understandable that his career record makes him an essential pick, but whether or not he can still perform to the level he has done in the last 5 years is the true question. But for that to be answered, we need a lot bigger sample than one game. Hes too important to the team just to drop him and expect another late order hitter to suddenly start producing at stupid high levels, whilst also sending down overs that are under the rate.
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