New Zealand make their fourth ICC white-ball final in the last ten years

Notes on Santner, Rachin, Williamson, Bavuma and more.

How do South Africa lose knockout games? It is not choking or rain. You can almost always trace it back to one thing – batting too slow.

It is hard to choke when you take no wickets, allow a big score, block out the powerplay, get massively behind the rate, and lose wickets regularly. That is called being completely and utterly outplayed. South Africa did three things right – they got Ngidi back in form for the right time, handled Henry pretty well and smacked South Africa at the death. None of these mattered.

Kane Williamson was allowed to sleepwalk through the first part of this innings because of how poor South Africa bowled. Their other frontline bowlers were terrible. Bavuma decided that he was allergic to making runs, and by the time Miller got to the period he wanted to smash, he was on his own. New Zealand out bowled, batted and fielded South Africa. They were the better in so many metrics that we’d have to invent more just to give them credit. South Africa came third in this match.

The Santner impact

Going into the 2023 World Cup, Mitchell Santner had not been bowling well in ODIs. He was a deep bench player in the IPL as well. And even though we expected him to do a little better on Asian wickets, there was still a question of whether it would be enough.

Well, he was fantastic in that tournament. And has been again here. Whatever funk he was stuck in, it’s gone. And the last 2-3 years now seems like a level he’d never even flirted with before.

At the moment he is a lock down spinner who can take wickets. In the previous two world events in the UK, he just wasn’t taking any victims at all.

You look at his Zulu stats, and his numbers are mostly around all-rounders from Asia, and even Carl Hooper. He’s a middling economical bowler, who doesn’t get wickets. But in the last couple of years, he has completely changed his cricket. He takes Test wickets now too.

I think the pitch got a little better for spin as it went on. But then again, so has Santner.

Rachin Ravindra is bossing another global ODI tournament

Rachin Ravindra started batting in the top-order from the first game of the 2023 World Cup. Since the start of that tournament, he has struck at 103 versus pace and 116 when he faced spin. In this innings, he batted at a faster clip than normal against the quicker bowlers, and scored at a strike rate of 97 against the spinners.

Rachin collected six doubles – all of them against pacers – and a three off Aiden Markram. He scored 72 runs on the legside, of which 53 came in the mid wicket and mid on regions.

Rachin is a world-class strike rotator, and he’s also 28% more likely to hit fours and 29% when it comes to sixes. Opening batters are generally good at hitting fours, but it is very rare that they also smash a lot of sixes. He’s great at both.

This map include his first eight innings at numbers six and seven.

Rachin has now dominated with the bat in his first two ICC ODI tournaments. He scored 578 runs at a strike rate of 106.4 in the World Cup, and has now made 226 runs in three innings in this Champions Trophy. His nearest neighbours on this graph are Scott Styris, Martin Crowe and Glenn Turner – elite company.

Today was his 5th ODI hundred in 28 innings; all of those have come in the World Cup and the Champions Trophy.

Kane Williamson’s incredible catch up

This was certainly a catch up innings though, but a really good one. He started quite slow, but as Temba Bavuma will be find out now, people usually only remember the end.

Since the start of 2022, Kane Williamson’s strike rate against pace was 81 before today, and 78 versus spin. He was considerably quicker against the faster bowlers, but there was an absolutely dramatic rise against spin – he scored at nearly 1.23 runs per ball against Keshav Maharaj and Markram.

Williamson also got a bunch of twos – five of them against pace, and three versus spin. Like Rachin, he also had a solid balls per boundary ratio today. He scored 27 runs in the point and third man regions, and also made 34 towards the mid wicket zone – just incredible batting.

Williamson is not as great a strike rotator as I thought he would be, but he’s just outstanding at taking doubles. He is a very good placer of the ball. He hits 5% fewer fours and 54% less sixes than expected for the balls he faces.

He rarely fails in an ICC tournament; his true average has been either at par or above that every single time. He was the Player of the Tournament in the 2019 World Cup. Even though his true strike was close to -10, he played some really brilliant knocks in tough match situations.

Temba’s terrible day out

Of all the formats, Temba Bavuma is by far the best at ODIs. He is a limited batter with a repeatable game plan that is perfectly set up to be good at 50 overs cricket. But he got stuck today. In fact, he might have even been going backwards for a while.

And the issue is that this nearly always happens when South Africa are in a knockout game. One or two players gets stuck, and then that’s it. In fact if you look at the Zulu stats of their batters, you can see the guys I am talking about. Kallis, Faf, Smith, Kirsten and Cullinan. They play within themselves, and then lose wickets trying to catch up.

The thing is, Bavuma plays the way they want him to. He knocks it around, makes sure the power hitters don’t see the powerplay and then get out of the way when it’s time to smash. Today, he got so stuck early on, and without the ability to catch up like Williamson did, that he turned a 360 chase into 400.

New Zealand probably left some runs out on the field. But Bavuma gave them back.