Boom and bust
Are some batters really boom or bust?
Zak Crawley was out for under 10 in 27 of his first 58 Test innings, or 47% of the time. We have 118 batters in our records with at least 60 Test innings, and only one of them had a more all-or-nothing first half to their career. Over his next 59 innings Crawley’s rate dropped to 34%, exactly the figure for Test openers since 2015.
Sky Sports wrote in May 2025 that famine had “too often” been interspersed with feast in his Test career, and the feasts were certainly real: 267 against Pakistan in 2020 and 189 against Australia at Old Trafford in 2023. None of that makes him a good Test opener, though. He averages 31.2, below the 33.6 for openers since 2015, and he has five hundreds in 117 innings when a typical opener makes one every 15. The second half of his career didn’t turn him into a reliable batter. It turned him into an ordinary one.
Every batter is boom or bust
Batters don’t score close to their average most of the time. In ODIs, batters in the top seven of the order are out for under 10 in 30% of their innings, and only 4% of their innings reach a hundred. Virat Kohli has 54 ODI hundreds and has still been out for under 10 on 69 occasions, 23% of his innings.
That’s just how batting works. A batter can get out on any ball, and is most likely to early on, before they have their eye in. Plenty of innings end cheaply, and the ones that get going can run a long way. Even the best batters have plenty of low scores alongside their big ones. What matters is whether some batters have more of both than others with the same average, and whether they keep doing it.
Reputations that faded
Crawley isn’t the only one. Sanjay Manjrekar once summed up KL Rahul’s Test batting as “good hundreds and then there is a lull”. In his first 60 Test innings Rahul was out for under 10 38% of the time, which put him 11th of those 118 batters for an all-or-nothing start. In his next 60 innings it was 27%, well below the 34% for Test openers, and he fell to 72nd.
Babar Azam’s Test record followed the same path. He was out for under 10 in 34% of his first 61 innings and 20% of his last 61, and went from ninth most all-or-nothing to 110th.
This is what regression to the mean looks like, and it’s why short runs of scores are so easy to misread. Take an opener who gets out for under 10 at the normal rate of 34%. Over 58 innings, luck alone would see them fail 27 times or more about 3% of the time. Across 118 batters, that’s three or four players who would look every bit as feast-or-famine as Crawley did without being any different from the rest.
The risk-takers who aren’t
Rishabh Pant calls his own game high-risk, and after his dismissal at the MCG in December 2024 Rohit Sharma said Pant would have to figure out the risk-reward balance for himself. Yet his Test record is one of the steadiest there is. Pant has been out for under 10 in 23% of his Test innings, compared with 31% for batters at Nos. 4 to 7 since 2015, and has made hundreds in 9% of them against their 6.5%. Of the 118, he ranks 106th for all-or-nothing.
Glenn Maxwell is the one who comes closest to his reputation. In T20 cricket he has been out for under 10 in 35% of his 448 innings, the same rate as other batters at Nos. 3 to 5 in the internationals and leagues we cover since 2015. Where he differs is at the top end: he has passed 50 in 14.3% of his innings against their 10.6%, with a strike rate of 155 against 126. Among the 398 batters in our records with at least 80 T20 innings, he was 64th most all-or-nothing in the first half of his career and 18th in the second, so in T20 the label has stuck. In ODIs it hasn’t. He went from 26th of 166 regular ODI batters to 119th.
The consistent ones
In February, ESPNcricinfo’s Anantha Narayanan ranked Mohammad Rizwan the third most consistent Test batter in history, and our figures agree. Rizwan has been out for under 10 in 18% of his Test innings, against 31% for batters at Nos. 4 to 7 since 2015, and he was among the four least all-or-nothing of the 118 in both halves of his career.
It doesn’t carry over to the other formats, though. In ODIs he went from 31st of 166 to 121st, and in T20 from 128th of 398 to 325th, the other way.
Babar in ODIs is the other case that has lasted. He ranked 158th and 135th of 166 in the two halves of his career. He has been out for under 10 in only 14% of his innings, against 28% for batters at Nos. 3 to 5 since 2015, and has made hundreds in 15% of them against their 6%.
Does it last?
Rizwan in Tests and Babar in ODIs are the exceptions. Here we took the fifth of batters whose first halves were the most all-or-nothing, the ones quickest to fall early and hardest to shift once past 30, and compared them with the fifth who were the least.
| Out under 10 | First half | Second half |
|---|---|---|
| T20 | 37.2% v 26.5% | 32.9% v 32.4% |
| Tests | 33.2% v 22.2% | 31.7% v 29.9% |
| ODIs | 35.7% v 22.3% | 29.5% v 24.5% |
In T20, a gap of more than ten points in the first half of their careers had shrunk to half a point by the second. In Tests it went from 11 points to two. ODIs kept a gap of five points.
The big scores evened out too. The most all-or-nothing fifth of Test batters made hundreds in 11.6% of their first-half innings, against 6.9% for the steadiest fifth. In the second half it was 7.3% against 6.4%.
Batting averages, on the other hand, do carry over. The fifth of T20 batters with the best first-half averages scored 35.6 to the worst fifth’s 19.9, and they were still well ahead in the second half, 32.1 to 22.4. How many runs a batter makes tends to last. How those runs are spread across their innings mostly doesn’t.
We’re built to spot patterns and tell stories about them, and a batter who makes 189 one week and nought the next practically writes their own. But most of the time the story is only a lopsided run of scores, and it evens out if you wait long enough.
How we counted
Men’s innings from Cricsheet batting in the top seven: Tests since December 2001, ODIs since June 2002, and T20 internationals and the men’s T20 leagues we cover. The career splits take each batter’s innings in date order and cut them in half, for batters with at least 60 Test or ODI innings, or 80 in T20, and 40 dismissals: 118 in Tests, 166 in ODIs and 398 in T20. All-or-nothing compares the chance of getting out on each run before reaching 10 with the same chance once past 30 (25 in T20).