finishing up with the leics match
match 6 cont'd
it's a bright sunny morning to start day 2 of the match, and vijay continues his gameplan: [play with a straight bat within the V](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N8baPdJ1C1c), put away the bad balls, and leave or defend the good deliveries.even if you’re hitting straight back at the bowler, no reason you can’t hit a 6!
in the 71st over, with runs free-flowing and 150 reached, Vijay feels composed enough to open up his game on the off side. still leaving the bad balls, but launching the full-length deliveries over deep point for six. there’s a reason for the urgency - wickets keep falling at the other end and Vijay wants to reach his 200 before he runs out of partners!
https://i.imgur.com/tu1ub5O.mp4
200 is looking iffy…
…and it proves elusive. Vijay is left stranded on 198 not out off 221 balls, and MSX crash to 294. the hitting apart from Vijay has proven dire. meanwhile, this is the most composed innings we’ve yet seen from Vijay, proving he can indeed show some restraint when required.
there was a bit of savescumming yes, but productive savescumming - rather than doing it to hit a good delivery better, i did it in order to remind myself to leave the bad balls. in short, tried to play it more like actual cricket!
Leicester’s second innings are much superior to their first. Vijay is only brought into bowl in the 35th over, around 5pm on Day 2, at which point Leics have sauntered comfortably to 113-1. he’s suprisingly toothless throughout the innings - ends up going wicketless in his 8 overs. Leics eventually lasts almost 110 overs and scores 378 - by which point it is 4:15pm on Day 3.
adding it all up, the run chase will therefore be 299 for MSX to win the match. Can they do it?
Funny situation here - I didn’t remember whether county matches lasted 3 or 4 days. (It’s 4.) I assumed that Middlesex needed to reach the total by the end of Day 3 in order to avoid a draw. With daylight fading, I started swinging (and save-scumming) like crazy. Not my finest hour…
Vijay plays a Bairstow-esque innings, spraying the offside with boundaries and scoring a century off 74 balls. and as the floodlights come on at Grace Road, Middlesex cruises to a 7-wicket victory. Who else would be man of the match but the guy who took six wickets and scored two unbeaten centuries?
https://i.imgur.com/G8kHeYx.mp4
Six matches in is a good time to take stock of our stats so far in our county campaign.
A fun fact on this: unlike what you might expect, batting average does not equal the average number of runs per innings.
this is because, as the cricket elders decided long ago, a “not out” innings should not be worth the same as one where you get out. if you’re not out, hypothetically you could have batted forever, if not artificially prevented from doing so!
therefore, a not out innings does not count against your denominator. BATTING AVERAGE = RUNS / WICKETS
in the previous match, Vijay scored over 300 runs for the loss of no wickets. this juices the hell out of our numerator, giving us the following batting average for the county campaign thus far: !! 182.25 !!
the bowling stats are similarly nuts. Sure, Vijay isn’t leading the league in wickets taken, but his 33 wickets come in just 809 balls, which is half as many as the league leader Amar Virdi. that gives us an eye-popping strike rate of a wicket every 24.5 deliveries, or a wicket every 4 overs. the economy numbers are even more impressive: 323 runs allowed, 2.39 runs an over, and an average of a wicket every 9.79 runs.
not only is Vijay a better batsman than current world #1 England’s Brave Joe Root, he’s also got a decent claim to be the best bowler currently playing in England.
one could say that Vijay is putting up (ahem) videogame numbers.