India is bad at batting at number four in ODI cricket. How do I know this? Because it is probably the thing told to me the most on social media. And the press is mentioning it just as much. I have never looked it up, because when so many people tell you something you just start to believe it.
But what if I told you that India was not actually a bad team batting at number four in ODI cricket?
We need a history lesson to work out where this all came from. India do not have a great history of number four ODI batters. Their best players generally get sucked into the top three. I find this interesting because the other two best Asian teams have a lot of top-scoring number fours, Sri Lanka have number two and three on the list, and Pakistan have three of the top ten as well.
So it’s an Indian peculiarity not to have many top-scoring number fours. But that is not to say that they’ve never had any. Mohammad Azharuddin was outstanding. Rahul Dravid spent a lot of time there as well. And of course, Yuvraj Singh is the third-highest scorer there. He is important, because he stops playing in 2017. But really, his career stops at the end of 2013 because of his cancer treatments.
Since 2014, India hasn't had a single player with 1000 runs at number four. Scotland does, in fact, so does Namibia, the USA and also PNG. So that is an issue. Not that those teams have better options; they have just stuck with them, and India have tried a few options.
There have been two World Cups in that time. In 2015, Ajinkya Rahane was the four in that first edition when Yuvraj wasn’t ready. He averaged just over 40 and struck in the low 80s. There were some guys who exploded that tournament, but essentially his numbers are fine, albeit a little slow. But he’s next to Joe Root here. Anytime your number four averaged 40 plus with an 80+ strike rate in this era, you would take that.
So what happened in 2019? Well, everyone had a go. Over the course of the tournament, India used four options. Rishabh Pant did it four times, Hardik Pandya got promoted twice, Vijay Shankar did it twice as well, and then KL Rahul had a go. It is worth pointing out many Indian fans thought Ambati Rayudu should have been in that spot as well. This means that no one really took the role, and India didn’t do great with their collective fours. But mostly they all did pretty poorly. India had the second-worst average of any team at the event. And their strike rate wasn’t anywhere near enough to compensate.
Since that World Cup, India has tried 11 players at number four. That seems like a lot, right? I read that in plenty of places about the problem with India and number fours. Only two countries have used more than them. The UAE, which has used everyone who owns a cricket bat in Dubai, and the West Indies. Not the company you want to be in. But on the same amount and with one less are Australia and England. These teams play a lot, so how many games does each number four play?
When you look at that, India are nowhere near as often as many other teams. They have used 11 number fours in part because they have been experimenting, and because they play more games than anyone else. Their number fours are playing six games each, about what looks normal compared to New Zealand and South Africa. Nowhere near the Netherlands or Australia. Sure, everyone dreams of Ireland, basically finding two number fours and sticking with that. But India has not gone through an epic list, they just play a lot.
I don’t want this to sound like a fan-lead theory though. Here is Rohit Sharma talking about India’s problems with number fours since Yuvraj Singh. And so, that is it, right, case closed. India cannot bat at number four in one-day internationals. The number is cursed.
But something didn’t feel right. Watching India, I never felt they had this black hole in their order. So I checked their numbers at number four compared to all ODI teams. And suddenly India looked pretty good. Not as good as the Yuvraj years, but there was nothing here to tell me there was a big issue. Very rarely was India a less than average team scoring at this position.
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