🏏 Batters to watch at the 2023 T20 World Cup
Best of the rest
Welcome to the third edition of Plot the Ball for 2023.
The 2023 T20 World Cup starts in South Africa today. Australia will — as usual — be favourites, but there are numerous interesting players on other teams to watch out for.
Batters to watch at the 2023 T20 World Cup
Back in December — ahead of the 2022 WBBL final — we looked at the top Australian batters in the T20 format, using a metric which I called ‘runs vs. expectation1’.
Today — with the 2023 T20 World Cup about to begin — I will use the same metric to identify a group of batters from countries other than Australia to look out for as the tournament progresses.
For this preview, I’ve looked at data from only the last three seasons of WBBL play; as a reminder, last year’s post — which identified Alyssa Healy as the pre-eminent T20 batter in Australia2 — looked at the entire history of the competition.
I have also ruled out batters who faced fewer than 240 deliveries in completed WBBL matches over this period, and excluded players who will not represent their countries3 in the upcoming tournament in South Africa.
In total, there will be eight players playing in the World Cup for nations other than Australia who have been ‘above-average’ batters — that is, they have scored more runs than expectation — over the last three WBBL tournaments.
India are the only nation with more than one player on the list: Smriti Mandhana (+5.4 runs vs. expectation per innings), Harmanpreet Kaur4 (+3.7) and Jemimah Rodrigues (+0.7) — ranked second, third and sixth respectively — all feature.
Five other teams have one representative. Sri Lanka’s Chamari Athapaththu (+0.1) and the West Indies’ Hayley Matthews (+0.2) are both just in positive territory; South African all-rounder Marizanne Kapp (+1.3) is their sole representative5.
New Zealand’s Sophie Devine was a destructive presence at the top of the order during this three-year period too, scoring at 2.8 runs per innings above expectation.
Top of the list, however, was England captain Heather Knight. Her return of 6.7 runs above expectation per innings was the best of any player — Australians included — in the WBBL over the last three years, even if she did feature in fewer games than many of her peers.
You’ll be able to watch Knight in action in England’s opener against the West Indies tomorrow — but the game you might want to circle is in just over a week’s time.
England face India in Gqeberha on Saturday 18th February, and the three top batters from this list should all be on show.
You can find the code for this piece on GitHub here
You can read that post here if you want a fuller explanation, but in short it is calculated for each innings as: the difference between a batter’s per-ball run-scoring rate and the scoring rate of all other players (on both sides) in that game, multiplied by the number of balls the batter faced in that innings.
However, as
pointed out in one of his World Cup preview pieces, Healy’s performance in the T20 powerplay has been middle-of-the-pack over the last couple of years.Rachel Priest (New Zealand), Deandra Dottin (West Indies), Mignon du Preez, Lizelle Lee and Dane van Niekerk (all South Africa) were all above-average batters according to this method of measurement during the 2020-22 period, but will not play in the World Cup.
NB: like Heather Knight, Kaur and Mandhana have each only played one WBBL season during this three-year period.
Chloe Tryon is another South African to look out for. After a strong showing in her early WBBL career, she has scored her runs just below expectation over the last three seasons — but has recently regained form, having mashed 134 off just 64 balls for once dismissed in South Africa’s three warm-up fixtures over the last week.