Scott Boland: The world's greatest understudy
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There is no point defending Scott Boland. It doesn't work. You will not survive. People have tried more than a thousand times in Test cricket, and he has taken 27 wickets. That may not sound like a lot, but people are dismissed every 42 balls when defending him. The next best player in the last five years is Kagiso Rabada, who takes one wicket for every 47 defensive shots played. Jasprit Bumrah and Josh Hazlewood are at 55 and 65 balls respectively.
Those are great bowlers, without any doubt. But Scott Boland is not just beating them, he is miles ahead. You're as likely to survive defending Boland as you are to stop a bus with your tongue or convince a dragon to take up crocheting.
The fact that this all comes from a bowler who was basically ignored completely, a late-blooming fast medium kind of guy, makes it all the more incredible. Australia don't even always pick him, but the batters pick him even less.
Boland's career is well documented, and I've covered it in the past. However, it's always worth remembering that he might have had an almost unremarkable, yet handy, professional career—if not for the invention of the wobbleball during its course.
He's a fast medium bowler. He's relatively accurate. He doesn't have any peak Test skills, until he manages to perfect the wobbleball. What he gets is huge amounts of seam in both directions. He also has a great angle for the wobbleball, and he's really accurate. He's not so slow that you can just run down the wicket at him.
He's quite strong, so he gets extra bounce. Everything seems to come together perfectly—he's either attacking the top of your middle stump or finding the outside edge, with the ball carrying through the slips time and time again.
You can see that there he has improved a lot in Shield cricket over time. As someone who watched him a lot when he was coming through, he was simply not anything like the bowler we see now.
If you asked me whether Scott Boland was going to be a great bowler for Australia about eight years ago, I would have said, "I'm not sure if he's going to be a great bowler for Victoria." He has essentially gone from being a sturdy first-class bowler to perhaps the best understudy in world cricket.
Even when he was first chosen for Australia, it wasn't as if people were saying that he was the future of bowling. He was seen more as someone who was a bit of a specialist. He had a couple of wickets, specifically the MCG, which he absolutely tormented batters on.
Therefore, he was going to be a very handy bowler who would come in for a couple of Test matches and probably never be seen again.
But when you look at his record in Shield cricket, you can see that this was never just about one ground. Scott Boland has dominated pretty much all the grounds he has played on. He looks like an ideal bowler specifically for Australian conditions.
We've only seen him play outside Australia a couple of times, so we don't know much about him away. But in Australia, with the bounce, the new seam movement, the grass, and specifically the Kookaburra ball with a reinforced seam, he's almost always going to get either bounce or sideways movement. That is perfect for a bowler like him.
So you have this bowler who was largely picked as a specialist, and no one was entirely sure about him when he first got a game. Currently, he has 50 Test wickets at a better bowling average than Jasprit Bumrah.
No one's comparing him to Bumrah. We're just asking: what on earth is happening here? How is this happening? Why is this happening? Where are we? What does it mean?
Of course, there are many reasons why this has happened. He has a really good angle back in, a bit like Bumrah. We talked about the fact that he has decent pace. He's very strong. He hits the pitch really hard, so when he gets the ball to wobble around, it really wobbles. He's incredibly accurate, and he works out his lengths very, very quickly.
You put all this together, and there aren't that many ways that you can actually play him. As we said at the start, you certainly cannot defend him.
Since he made his debut, the overall average is just around 29 for all seamers. Excluding Asia, it goes down to under 28. Boland has been averaging less than 19.
I don't want to burst Boland's balloon, but the match factor tells us that he's been 41 percent better than other bowlers. Australia have essentially used him on wickets that seam quite a bit.
For one, we know that the Australian wickets have changed. But specifically, it seems that when Boland is in the team, the ball is moving around a lot. He's 41 percent better than other seamers in the matches he has played. In the same time, Jasprit Bumrah's average is 70 percent less than the other pacers combined.
However, if you just look at Boland compared to the other Australian bowlers in the matches he has played, he has a better average than Cummins, Starc, and Lyon. Even though his match factor doesn't look as outstanding as Bumrah's, he is the best bowler for Australia in the games he plays. Of course, he has played only one game with Hazlewood, but even then, this is pretty special.
There are a couple of things worth looking at for Boland. As I said before, almost all of his success has come in Australia. Now, most of his Tests have also come in Australia. He did play one Test in India, but he only bowled 102 deliveries—not much take away from that. If you look at the other five Test series, there's an obvious outlier. He was unplayable in the Ashes at home, great against South Africa and the West Indies, and has been incredible again in this series. But what about when he went to England for the Ashes? They absolutely smashed him.
I think a part of this was their plan. They probably got away with it a little bit; if you look at the control percentage, he should have gotten more wickets on that tour. But there is no doubt that England thought, "Why are we trying to defend this guy who is undefendable? Let's just smack him." He went at nearly five runs an over and had an average of 116 in that series.
While he is the absolute best at dismissing batters when they defend him in Test cricket, he's kind of middle of the road for attacking shots. He is still at the better end of this graphic, and is not exactly getting smashed.
But there is a big difference between trying to defend Scott Boland and trying to attack him. It seems like you can attack him, whereas it does not seem like you can defend him at all.
Even though England did manage to score off him, when you check the actual economy rate, he only goes at 15 runs per over for attacking shots. That sounds like a lot, but you can see there aren't many players on this list who have actually gone for less. He has the seventh-best economy of the bowlers on this graph.
Teams have tried to attack him before, but they haven't actually managed to do so. One of the reasons is that he doesn't make any mistakes. He doesn't bowl poor balls or give you any options.
It's hard to attack him even when you try, and the only way to do it is to force it. The best method, as England found out, was to change his length—either by batting in and out of the crease repeatedly or by coming down the pitch to him as if he's a spinner.
That is exactly what India tried to do today. Jaiswal decided to come down the wicket, change the length, make sure that Boland couldn't actually keep him in that spot. But it didn't matter. Boland still found his edge.
Again, from his first ball, Nitish Reddy decided to come down the wicket and knock Boland off that length. The only problem was that he edged the ball through to the slips as well.
It's an easy thing to say, but it's really hard to do, especially on these Australian wickets that are a little faster. On top of that, Alex Carey is more than capable of coming up to the stumps now as well. This just means that Boland is going to be bowling at that length over and over again.
When he bowls at that length over and over again, he will eventually get you out. He's nine percent more likely to get you out when you are attacking him, which is still really good. It just doesn't seem as impressive, because he has a more than 77 percent chance of getting you out when you are defending.
You cannot defend Scott Boland.
How do we know this? Because so many people have tried.
