Cricket’s boom-or-bust reputations under pressure

In August 2020, a 22-year-old Zak Crawley made 267 against Pakistan at the Rose Bowl. Over the next ten months he batted twelve more times for England, in Galle, Ahmedabad, Lord’s and Edgbaston, and passed 20 once.

Nobody forgets a sequence like that. A double hundred followed by a string of single figures looks like a pattern, and the pattern became a story about the kind of batter Crawley is. Sky Sports was still writing in May 2025 that famine had “too often” been interspersed with feast in his Test career.

Cricket hands out these labels all the time. Glenn Maxwell is all or nothing. KL Rahul makes good hundreds and then goes quiet. Mohammad Rizwan is the steady one. The scorebooks say how well each label has held up.

Crawley’s reputation outlived the scores

Crawley’s early career did earn the label. He was out for under 10 in 27 of his first 58 Test innings, close to half of them.

Over his next 59 innings, that fell to about a third, exactly the rate for Test openers since 2015. His cheap dismissals now arrive no more often than anyone else’s at the top of the order.

That leaves him with a different problem. His Test average of 31.2 is below the 33.6 for openers since 2015. Crawley has become less all-or-nothing and ended up with an ordinary opener’s record.

Every great batter has cheap days

Virat Kohli has 54 ODI hundreds and 69 dismissals for under 10. Those cheap dismissals come in 23% of his innings, against 30% for ODI batters in the top seven.

Every batter is vulnerable before getting their eye in, and an innings that survives the first few overs can run a long way. So low scores sit alongside hundreds in even the best careers. A batter who truly deserves the boom-or-bust label has to keep producing more of both than others with the same average.

Reputations that faded

Sanjay Manjrekar once summed up Rahul’s Test batting as “good hundreds and then there is a lull”. Early on, that was fair. Rahul was out for under 10 in 38% of his first 60 Test innings. Over his next 60, that fell to 27%, below the 34% for Test openers since 2015.

Babar Azam’s Test career followed a similar path. His rate of dismissals for under 10 fell from 34% in his first 61 innings to 20% in his last 61.

Crawley, Rahul and Babar all had a run of cheap dismissals early in their careers that was easy to remember and turn into a verdict. All three then became harder to dismiss cheaply, and the verdict took longer to change than the batting did.

The risk-takers

Rishabh Pant calls his own game high-risk. After his dismissal at the MCG in December 2024, Rohit Sharma said Pant would have to figure out the risk-reward balance for himself.

For a batter who invites that conversation, Pant’s Test returns have been remarkably steady. He has been out for under 10 in 23% of his innings, against 31% for batters at Nos. 4 to 7 since 2015, and has made more hundreds than them too. The risks have paid.

Maxwell comes closest to living up to his label. In T20, he has been out for under 10 in 35% of his innings, the same rate as other batters at Nos. 3 to 5 in the internationals and leagues we cover since 2015.

The difference comes at the top end. His strike rate is 155 against their 126, and he passes 50 more often. He fails as often as his peers and makes much more of the days he gets in. His ODI record has lost even that shape over the second half of his career.

The consistent ones

In February, ESPNcricinfo’s Anantha Narayanan ranked Rizwan the third most consistent Test batter in history. The record backs him. Rizwan has been out for under 10 in 18% of his Test innings, against 31% for batters at Nos. 4 to 7 since 2015. In our rankings he was among the four least all-or-nothing Test batters in both halves of his career.

Babar’s ODI batting is the other lasting case. He has been out for under 10 in only 14% of his ODI innings, against 28% for batters at Nos. 3 to 5 since 2015, while making hundreds in 15% against their 6%. Fewer failures and more hundreds, year after year, is about as good as a reputation gets.

Does the reputation last?

Rizwan in Tests and Babar in ODIs are the exceptions. Take the regular Test batters who began their careers with the most all-or-nothing records, and set them against those who began steadiest. By the second half of their careers, the two groups were almost impossible to tell apart.

The gap in cheap dismissals shrank from 11 points to two. The hundreds evened out as well: the all-or-nothing group went from making far more hundreds than the steady group to barely more. T20 told the same story, with a ten-point gap closing to almost nothing, and only ODIs kept a small difference.

Batting averages held up much better. The T20 batters with the highest averages early in their careers were still well clear of the rest in the second half.

That is the part worth backing. A batter’s average carries from one season to the next; the way the runs arrive mostly does not.

Back to Crawley

Crawley went to Perth last November for the first Ashes Test and fell to Mitchell Starc in the first over of both innings. Sky Sports counted the damage that week: 44 single-figure scores in 109 Test innings.

That tally still leans on the months after the Rose Bowl. Since early 2023, Crawley has been dismissed cheaply about as often as any Test opener, and at the Gabba a fortnight after Perth he made 76. The real mark against him is an average of about 31. That is a duller story than feast or famine, and it is the one his record tells.