Axar Patel’s Improbable Feat & the Flavors of SLA Bowling
A look at the contrasting styles of Leach, Axar & Jadeja and a perspective on just how mind-blowing Axar’s figures are
Axar Patel turned the notion of International Test Cricket being a higher quality affair than domestic first class cricket on its head.
Axar Patel had played 42 first-class matches, bowling 1462 overs for 3669 runs 134 wickets. That is a wicket about every 11 overs at an avg of 27.4.
In the 3 tests that he has played so far, he has bowled 766 deliveries for 286 runs and 27 wickets. That is a wicket every 5 overs at an avg of 10.59!
To put this in perspective, a random 766 deliveries from SLA in Tests would yield more than 18 wkts less than 1% of the time even in India. Here are the top SLA Test bowlers (>1000 deliveries) of all time & the top ones in India by SR.
If we use their deliveries, Axar Patel’s feat or better has a less than 1 in 1000 chance of happening (in both cases). If we include all types of spinners in India, this goes up to a 1.5 in 1000 chance — still miniscule.
Meanwhile, there was another left arm spinner bowling in these matches on the same wickets — Jack Leach.
Leach has bowled about 1000 more first class overs than Axar Patel, 2458, taking a wicket every 9–10 overs at an avg of 25.3. In Tests as well, he has taken a wicket every 10 overs, but at a slightly higher average of over 30.
In the same Tests as Axar, he bowled 666 deliveries for 336 runs and 12 wickets. That is a wicket every 9–10 overs at an avg of 28 runs. He did have a 6 wicket haul in the Test that Axar didn’t play in, which came at a faster clip, but at higher cost (in runs).
Let’s take a look at the difference in bowling styles between Leach and Axar. They are both left arm “orthodox”, but that is where the similarity ends. They are two artists that we tend to categorize using the same broad strokes, but they go about their business in contrasting fashion. We see here, the difference between someone who has developed as a more traditional longer format bowler and someone who has grown up on the shorter formats.
Leach looks to turn the ball, while Axar is more about the angle. Note, that Axar bowled with the new ball in 3 of the 6 innings he bowled in.
Leach has the stock ball, and a range of subtle variation around it (see the fairly even distribution on either side). Axar’s variations on the other hand, are significantly different from his stock ball.
A lot of people think about the arm ball from Axar as a variation, but against RHB, he actually used this as his stock ball.
A lot of people think about the arm ball from Axar as a variation, but against RHB, he actually used this as his stock ball. His lines were very consistently just outside off stump and he took the ball away as a variation. Leach on the other hand, kept pegging away using similar deliveries.
To the RHB, for every outgoing delivery that Axar bowled, he bowled 2.4 that came in. Leach was almost the exact opposite, bowling 2.6 that went away to each arm ball.
But is it really the arm ball?
Both Axar & Leach got a significant number of their right handed dismissals on the arm ball — 12 out of 22 bowled or leg before for Axar on his stock ball & 6 of 11 on a similar delivery for Jack, which he used as a variation.
Given the contrasting bowling styles, if we look at the deliveries as stock and variation, there are a couple of interesting insights here:
- The variation was more successful for Axar while the stock was more successful for Leach
- Even though the Arm ball took 55% of the wickets between them and popularly contributed to Axar’s success in a big way, the conventional delivery going away from the RHB had a higher rate of success. If you bowl only arm balls, you will only get wickets with arm balls!
the conventional delivery going away from the RHB had a higher rate of success. If you bowl only arm balls, you will only get wickets with arm balls!
To LHB, they had similar approaches, but Leach relied a lot more on the big turners from a foot and a half outside off with very occasional straighter ones, while Patel used the straight one coming in with the angle (and even going down leg, although this might be an unintentional lapse in control) about 1/3rd of the time.
As a result of these lines, that Patel was bowling, he was also firing it in a tad faster and keeping it a touch shorter (~25cm).
Axar’s bowling is clearly influenced by the shorter format. Let’s take a look at how much and the adjustments he has made from the shorter form.
In the shorter versions, he turns the ball even less and bowls even faster and shorter……
……. And he gets fewer bowled and LBW dismissals in the shorter format! The more arm balls he bowls, the fewer dismissals he gets from those two modes — ~30% (~35% for RHB) for T20s and ~45% (~39% for RHB) for ODIs.
The more arm balls he bowls, the fewer wickets he gets bowled & LBW
So, should Axar Patel’s bowling strategy be different? Is there even more that he could be squeezing out here? There is obviously more digging to do here, but I am not going to pretend I can do that without some iterative back and forth with Axar and coaches around him.
Meanwhile, there is one more left arm spinner we should look at here — Ravi Jadeja.
The comparison & competition with Jadeja
Jadeja is 5yrs and 50 Tests Axar’s senior. He is someone who has been a solid performer in all three formats of the game. In Tests, he has the 7th best SR as a SLA bowler overall and 2nd best in India. As Jarrod Kimber wrote, Axar was an understudy. But then there is this thing called recency bias and the desire for a new idol, which triggers some pleasure center in the heads of sports fans, and administrators in certain cases, that is akin to a child getting their hands on a new toy.
So, let’s take a look at how he compares to Axar. We will just look at deliveries bowled in India.
Jadeja bowls a much tighter line to RHB…
… and not only mixes it up much more, but also does so more subtly (distribution has a single hump that is shifted, not two humps) to RHB. For LHB, he plays around much less and keeps going with the delivery turning into the batsman.
Jadeja also bowls a bit fuller and this makes sense as he is not bowling as many arm balls, but he bowls just as fast as Axar. So he is getting them to turn at speed.
Jadeja has 40% of his wickets (45% against RHB) out bowled and LBW. This is fewer than what Axar got, but this is also because Jadeja doesn’t depend on those dismissal modes. His subtle variation outside off, means that he also keep the catch to the wicket keeper and slips in play more prominently.
In terms of performance, Axar has outdone himself as well. The probably that we could see the 6 bowling performances that we saw from him just by random luck, even from his own or Jadeja’s first class performances is less than 1% (for real, I simulated this).
So, where do we go from here? What can we expect in the long run?
Well, we’ve seen only ~21 SLA bowlers in Test history who have bowled more than 3000 deliveries. None of them took 27 wickets in the first 766 balls they bowled. Jadeja took 7. Here are the top 10 and how they ended up.
We saw this earlier, but note again in this context, that Leach also took 12 wickets in 666 balls that he bowled in the three matches that Axar played as well.
If we include all types of spinners, Mehdi Hasan Miraz leads the pack with 19 wickets in the first 766 deliveries. He is currently at a SR of 59 and an avg of 32.42 off 5906 deliveries. Also featuring in the top 10 here are Danish Kaneria & Yasir Shah with 17 and 16 respectively, Kumble & Stuart MacGill with 16 each, and Murali, Warne & Ashwin with 15 each. (Narendra Hirwani was missing from my database. I don’t have his first 766 balls but he took 16 wickets in his first Test in about 30 odd overs and 20 more in the next 3 matches of the series IIRC. He ended up with a SR of 65 and an avg of 30.1 in ~4300 deliveries)
Does this show that Axar Patel is destined for greatness? No. This is more likely to be a flash in the pan, if he even gets to play a few more Tests for India. But, for something like this to happen, the stars really had to align. And while we can talk about the influence of T20 on Test cricket and how the Axar Patel school of bowling can succeed in Tests, what we’ve seen here is that those opinions may be jumping the gun a bit even if we set aside the improbability of the event and focus on the deliveries that were bowled. Taking absolutely nothing away from Axar Patel and giving him an ovation for only subtly changing what he does without worrying about the holy stage of Test cricket, I am sure the English batsmen have been giving this some thought ahead of the Ashes. Should be an interesting edition between two bruised sides.
If you enjoyed this piece, check out more of my work at Boundary Line and follow along here & on twitter @amol_desai
