During the recent England v New Zealand T20 series, Alex Hartley observed on comms that for the first 4 games in the series, the team that had “won” the powerplay went on to lose the match. This was definitely an interesting titbit. In the entire history of T20s between the sides that now make up the ICC Championship, the team that won the powerplay went on to win the match 72% of the time.

One of the other commentators then went on to assert two further things.

1. That there had been a recent downward trend in that number.
2. That this was due to improvements in middle-order batting.

Let’s look at the numbers! (For the mathsy among you, this is using a polynomial trend.)

It is true that there has been a distinct downward tick recently – for several years, from 2014 to 2022, the number hovered at around 70%, but has now crashed down to below 50%, so it does look like something is going on.

But… is it?

Although we are talking about hundreds of matches overall, hundreds aren’t actually very big numbers in stats terms, especially when you are looking at trends like this. So although the downtick shown here looks fascinating, it might not actually be very significant.

In order to illustrate this, let’s look at what happens if I change the results of just 3 recent matches.

If the outcome of as few as 3 games had been different, that startling downtick completely disappears, and we are back at the long-term trend of around 70%!

So to conclude, although there is a recent downward trend in the relationship between winning the powerplay and winning the match, it is probably just “noise”. The number fluctuates up and down – this is the “down”, but it will go up again, and there is no exciting new trend. (Sorry commentators!)

Moving on to the commentator’s second point, and admittedly somewhat more subjectively, even if it is not noise, the idea that it is due to improvements in middle order batting is palpably not upheld by what happened in the England v New Zealand series.

In the games New Zealand lost, they won the powerplays because they went of at 90mph, like that kid on parkrun who always sprints to the front at the start, but their middle order was completely unable to maintain that pace, so they fell off a cliff in the middle overs and went on to lose the game. Furthermore, in England’s case the game they lost was also due to a middle order collapse.

There definitely have been trends in batting over recent years, most obviously in the absolute number of runs scored; but this doesn’t appear to be one of them: the team winning the powerplay usually goes on to win the match 70% of the time, and the likelihood is that it will stay that way.