Head: above Bradman and Gilchrist?
Travis Head (of the last 3 years) might be the most destructive batter in Australian Test history
Who is Australia’s fastest ever scoring Test batsman?
And where does Travis Head come?
On one level, this is simple: it’s Adam Gilchrist; Travis Head is fourth.
Gilchrist scored at 82.0 runs per hundred balls - almost 12 runs above David Warner in second place. No wonder watching Gilly was so entertaining!
And no wonder oppositions fear Travis Head. His career strike rate of 66.2 is impressive, but if you confine it to the second iteration of his career - since his return to the Aussie side during the 2021/22 Ashes - it is 79.7.
Effectively, for the last three years Head has batted like Gilchrist.
Here is the list of the top 10 Australian strike rates. It might be a little different to lists you have seen before, because it includes players of the distant past whose strike rates are harder to determine.* (I’ve coloured them in mauve).
Bradman, at number six, is impressive - especially when you consider the two immediately below him in the world list: Ian Botham (60.7) and Brian Lara (60.5).
Furthermore, looking only at raw strike rates is a bit unfair on players of long ago. In an era of small bats, big boundaries, no gym work and no ODI or T20 cricket, Test scoring rates were bound to be slower.
To normalise for all of this, I think comparing a batter’s strike rate with those of his peers is a worthwhile exercise.
Let’s start with Bradman and Gilchrist.
In all Tests in which Gilchrist played, the rest of the Aussie team scored at a stunning 60.6 runs per 100 balls. By contrast, Bradman’s teammates’ strike rate was only 44.5**.
Bradman’s era was slooooow!
With a strike rate of 61.0, Bradman scored 1.37 times faster than his teammates.
With a strike rate of 82.0, Gilchrist scored 1.35 times faster than his.
So, if (and I recognise the ‘if’ here is a big one, covering a raft of assumptions) Bradman had played in Gilchrist’s era and outscored his teammates at his typical rate, he would have had a Test strike rate of 85.1 - ie, higher than Gilchrist.
I must say I had not expected this. I knew Bradman was fast for his era; I didn’t think he was quite that fast!
When I adjust the strike rates of all players using this method, suddenly the top 10 looks a little different***:
Bradman jumps to the top!
I know, I know. This method is hardly foolproof, but I do think it has some merit and is, at the very least, interesting.
It is quite cool that arguably Australia’s three most iconic entertainers - Bradman, Trumper and Gilchrist - have lobbed on top.
Travis Head has dropped to 7, but I could not help running the numbers for him since his reappearance in the team . . .
Head is now on top! So, it is possible to make the case, I suppose, that Head of the last three years is the most entertaining Australian Test batter of all time.
Finally, while putting together this article I chanced upon an article about Harry Brook in London’s Daily Telegraph by Scyld Berry. I enjoyed the article and noted this quote:
So, I decided to run Harry Brook through the algorithm.
In the Tests Brook has played, the rest of the England batters collectively have scored at 79.3 runs per hundred balls. Brook’s strike rate is currently 88.6 (note that Berry’s figure of 96 above is for away Tests only), or 1.12 times as fast as his teammates.
So if Brook had played in the same Test matches as Gilchrist and scored at 1.12 times the rate of the Australian players, he would have had a strike rate of 69.5 - substantially below the Don.
This leads me to make three observations:
Gosh this current England side scores quickly!
I am not necessarily claiming Bradman would have scored faster than Brook
But it is kind of cool to imagine Bradman in the Bazball era - ramping, reversing and switching, with a big bat, big biceps, and Big Baz urging him on!
Brook is wonderful for the game, and so is Head. And, crucially, their methods aren’t just exciting, I would argue they are also pragmatic: Brook’s Test average is currently 61.6; Head’s is 43.2 and, for the last three years, it’s 45.2.
Aggressive batting is the way to go. Head and Brook are proof . . . and so was Bradman!
The fine print
In any exercise of this kind, caveats and exceptions abound. I spared you from them in the body of the article but here they are!
*Balls-per-innings records are patchy from before the 1980s however, cricket historians have been able to extrapolate the results - to within a run or two per hundred balls. Disappointingly though, most sites do not use these figures and omit players like Bradman and Trumper from strike rate lists, or else include them but with only partial data - which is actually worse. For example, you will often see Bradman’s strike rate listed as 58.
**We don’t have runs per hundred balls directly for earlier eras, but we do have runs per over (for eras when the over was not six balls, happily figures have been converted to per six balls).
Runs per over includes extras - and extras were slightly different prior to the modern era: in the past, the team only got a run for a no ball or a wide if no other runs were scored from that ball. By Gilchrist’s era this had changed: if you hit a no-ball for 4 the team would get 5 not 4. As such, converting runs per over to strike rate as I have done slightly disadvantages Gilchrist - but I think by only a slender amount. The specific method I used is illustrated in the table below: I converted runs per over to runs per 100 balls (Strike rate) and then excised the individual’s figures from the total to arrive at the strike rate of their teammates.
***The source for the old players’ strike rates is the magnificent sportstats.com.au. Its list of the top strike rates of all time eventually cuts out at a raw strike rate of 51.4. As such, it is possible that other players from earlier eras (whose strike rates are not known precisely) would have figured in my calculations had they been included in the list.
Neil Harvey is an interesting case: as with other players of his era, his exact strike rate is not known. And he did not appear on sportstats.com.au’s main list. However, his strike rate does appear elsewhere on the site - they pinned it at 49.7. As such, I was able to include him in my calculations. It turns out that the strike rate in his era was incredibly low and Harvey’s 49.7 was so large in comparison that, when I extrapolated what his strike rate might have been in Gilchrist’s, era it was a very fast 74.7.
It is likely that if the strike rate list on sportstats.com.au reached down into the high 40s some other players from slow scoring eras might figure in my ‘Gilly-era’ list - players such as Doug Walters, Rod Marsh, Keith Stackpole, Alan Davidson and Richie Benaud etc. But I think it is pretty much impossible that they could knock Bradman, Trumper and Gilchrist out of the top three.
Re “Bradman’s era was slooooow!”; in terms of runs per over, yes. But what about runs per minute? (For the sake of argument I’ll claim that’s a better measure of battertainment than runs per ball 😉) it’d be fascinating (I think!) to re-do some of these stats using that measure. How many runs would Gilly (or Brook) make in a session if there were 20 overs an hour rather than the current 13-15?