We have heard about about the Laras, Bradmans and Tendulkars dominating the International Test circuit with scores of consistent performances and amassing centuries and beyond better than any player could.
But let me introduce to one player who has achieved something none of these players could: A stunning median score.
Meet Ken Barrington.
One of England’s forgotten legends in batting, this test player represented the county in 82 tests and while the statistics of 20 International hundreds at an average of 58.67 might not seem the most flashy, he has been Test Cricket’s most consistent batsman ever.
An analysis by ESPNCricinfo on What median scores tell us about batting careers
talks about how various test stalwarts have failed in achieving the distribution of scores achieved by this batsman over his career.The prime statistic used here is Median and Pearson Skew Coefficient -2
(PSC-2 Coefficient Explained: lower the value, the less positively skewed is the data)
While Barrington’s score distribution was insane with extremely low skewness and getting out on 0–4 a mere 17 times, his PSC-2 Score and the median are right up there with the best.
Let’s look at other stalwarts of the game.
Don Bradman
Sachin Tendulkar
Brain Lara
The best performers
And the worst
Notice how batsmen like Ijaz Ahmed, Nasser Hussain, Zaheer Abbas, Cheteshwar Pujara and Alastair Cook have tremendous skewness in their batting performance: driven primarily by the tendency to go big or go home. Having tremendously high scores and a lot of mid ranged scores cause the following: a performance similar to Alastair Cook’s dismal performance in Ashes 2017–18 with a solitary 244.
Ken Barrington’s career was known of a person who could be that brick wall of defence to traumatise a bowling unit, and while we can not really compare his style of game with the batsmen of today, it is an interesting way to look at the game.