🏏 India have started their test cricket transition. When will Australia start theirs?
My Week in Sport(s): a Border-Gavaskar Trophy preview, Nelly Korda and Josh Allen
Welcome to My Week in Sport(s) — a regular newsletter from Plot the Ball.
In this edition:
🏏 Test cricket’s approaching talent cliff edge
⛳️ Recapping Nelly Korda’s six-win season (so far)
🏈 Josh Allen, getting the Bills out of trouble
🏏 India have started their test cricket transition. When will Australia start theirs?
If the All Blacks — who we discussed in the last edition of this newsletter — are proof of anything, it’s that expecting one golden generation of a sporting team to age out without any impact on the bottom line is wishful thinking.
That’s particularly true in a sport like rugby because of the importance of relationships between players in aspects of the game like team defence. As we saw a couple of weeks ago, the All Blacks have suffered without the ball — likely for this reason — in recent years.
But it’s also true in much more atomised team sports like cricket, for the straightforward reason that elite skill is difficult to find and replace. As a consequence, teams try and hold on to proven performers for as long as they can.
Two of the top teams in men’s test cricket are now facing up to the reality that they will have to transition to their next generation of talent sooner rather than later.
The current test sides of Australia and India have played out some epic contests. While Australia won the World Test Championship final in London last year, India have claimed victory in each of the two most recent four-test series: a heist on the road at the end of 2020, and a more comprehensive home win in early 2023.
They are now back on Australian soil for the latest edition of the Border-Gavaskar Trophy — and it will likely be the last tour of the country for a number of their veterans1.
Although those players in their late 30s will still play an important role, the visitors have at least started to select their test side with one eye on the future. The hosts, on the other hand, have remained committed to the cohort of players who brought that World Test Championship crown back to Australia last June.
Let’s consider the two teams’ batting line-ups over the last couple of decades first.
In their last ten tests, the average age of India’s has started to creep downwards again — and their trend line has decoupled from Australia’s, whose line-up continues to get older.
India have had clear recent success blooding young batting talent.
In their squad for Australia, they have four players aged 27 or younger who are already solid test batters or better2: Yashasvi Jaiswal and Shubman Gill at the top of the order, alongside Sarfaraz Khan and Rishabh Pant in the middle order.
Meanwhile, Australia have basically avoided doing so until forced.
Now — following the retirement of David Warner — they have to fill an important spot at the top. And the process they’ve followed doesn’t inspire confidence in how the selectors will manage the team’s inevitable transition.
First of all, they tried pushing Steven Smith up a couple of slots to open. But he’s now returned to his natural home in the middle of the line-up, and Nathan McSweeney is set to make his test debut in the first test in Perth next week.
McSweeney is 25 years old and has the record of a capable first-class batter — so this seems like a step in the right direction.
But there’s a catch. He’s never batted at the top of the order in domestic cricket:
When we look at both teams’ bowling units, however, Australia appear to have a bit more time on their side.
The average age of each team’s attack has been trending upward, but in their last test Australia were almost a full year younger than India on average.
In Todd Murphy, too, they already have a replacement lined up for first-choice spinner Nathan Lyon — the oldest bowler in their squad for Perth.
In contrast, India’s bowling attack — which has spearheaded their transformation as a test team — is the oldest it’s been in the modern era. The question, after a 3-0 upset loss at home to New Zealand, is whether their skills are waning.
As Kartikeya Date of pointed out in his wrap-up of the series, it’s not clear from the record that they are declining in any meaningful sense. They’ll still need to unearth some younger bowling talent in the next couple of years, though.
11 bowlers have taken 20 or more wickets in tests for India since the start of the inaugural World Test Championship cycle in 2019. Only two — wrist spinner Kuldeep Yadav and off-spinner Washington Sundar — are currently below the age of 30, and they have just 54 wickets between them over this period3.
Whether they’ll be able to carry the attack after the inevitable decline and fall of Ashwin and Jadeja — 38 and 35 respectively — is the question that looms over India’s future.
The question looming over men’s cricket more broadly, though, is this: how much has the funnelling of the best young talent towards its shorter, more lucrative formats impacted the viability of the test game?
The concurrent aging of the two nations who historically dominate this longer format seems like a warning sign: even there4, players’ priorities — and, crucially, their development time — now arguably lie elsewhere.
And the situation is even more dire in the countries where tests are less financially viable to stage.
It’s easy to sound alarmist when discussing the future of test cricket.
But I do wonder whether this upcoming series between Australia and India will eventually be remembered as the last true heavyweight bout of test cricket’s last golden era.
⛳️ Run the Numbers
The fact that Nelly Korda clinched the LPGA Tour’s 2024 Player of the Year award with a number of events left to play was entirely unsurprising.
The American reeled off six victories in seven starts between January and May.
But the months since that streak haven’t been plain sailing — by her exceptionally high standards, at least. Korda hasn’t won since the first half of the year, and her underlying performance has trended downward during the second.
The LPGA does make Strokes Gained data available for its events. These figures are presented relative to the field in a given tournament, however, and not adjusted for field strength5 — as Data Golf does with PGA Tour data to come up with its ‘True Strokes Gained’ measure, which captures players’ actual skill levels more accurately.
Still, it provides an interesting insight into Korda’s season to date.
Through that sixth win of 2024 at the Mizuho Americas Open — a stretch lasting 31 rounds — she was beating the field by around 2.9 strokes per round on average. Over the 18 rounds she’s played in completed tournaments since then, though, that figure has dropped off to below +1.5 strokes.
In particular, her approach play6 has suffered: across four rounds at the US Women’s Open and Women’s PGA Championship, she lost almost six shots to the field in this facet of her game — and subsequently missed the cut in both tournaments.
Korda is back in action in Florida this week after missing a few tour stops with a neck injury, and has the chance to end an already exceptional year on an upward trajectory.
If she can hit it straighter than Caitlin Clark7 — her playing partner in a pro-am on Wednesday — she’s got a decent chance of becoming the first player in 13 years to record a seven-win LPGA Tour season.
🏈 Watch the Games
Sunday’s match-up between Josh Allen and Patrick Mahomes will see my two favourite NFL quarterbacks to watch go head to head.
Their performances over the last number of seasons have been so good that they’re also rated as the two best QBs in the league — at least according to the accounting8 of
of .But look only at their 2024 campaigns and you can see that they’ve both been playing at slightly lower levels than we’re used to.
Allen is still doing one of the subtle things he excels at, though: avoiding sacks.
There was a great example of this in the Bills’ win over the Indianapolis Colts last weekend. With 18 seconds remaining in the second quarter, Buffalo had the ball in their own half as they looked to add to their four-point lead.
After taking the snap out of the shotgun, Allen doesn’t have long before the protection on the left-hand side of his offensive line disintegrates and he’s forced to step up in the pocket.
As soon as he steps up, he’s faced with another defender breaking through the right side — but he manages to skip out of their attempted tackle and towards the sideline.
Throughout the sequence, Allen has been able to focus his gaze beyond the pressure and track his receivers downfield. When the quarterback finally escapes into space, he spots Mack Hollins running free and releases a pass just before crossing the line of scrimmage for a 44-yard gain.
Instead of ending with a whimper, this Bills drive finishes with a converted field goal — and Allen’s team take a seven-point lead into half-time.
You can watch a clip of this sequence here.
The next edition of My Week in Sport(s) will be published on Saturday November 23rd.
calls them “their four eminences: captain Rohit Sharma (37), ex-captain Virat Kohli (imminently 36), Ravichandran Ashwin (38) and Ravi Jadeja (36), heroes of a thousand fights, but nearer the end than the beginning.” (On the topic of Kohli: Ben Jones’ analysis of his relative decline for Code Sports, which you can read here, is excellent.)
Using the method of analysis we’ve employed before, and comparing each player to their peers in the tests they’ve played since August 2019: Gill has averaged 2.2 more runs per dismissal than other top-three batters, and Jaiswal has a mark of +21.1 compared to the same cohort; in the middle order, Sarfaraz has averaged 14.7 runs per dismissal above expectation, and Pant has averaged +13.4. (The one young batter Australia have integrated over this period — Cameron Green, who will miss the series with an injury — has scored +0.9 runs per dismissal compared to expectation in the middle order in his career to date.)
Kuldeep is missing the Australian tour because of injury, but Washington — who was their joint-top wicket-taker in the New Zealand series — has travelled.
16 players have debuted for either country in tests since August 2019 at the age of 27 or younger; 41 such players have debuted in One-Day Internationals over the same period, and 43 in T20 Internationals.
The LPGA’s ‘SG: Approach’ metric “compares golfers’ performance on all shots more than 50 yards from the pin. Tee shots are excluded for par 4s and par 5s.”
Golf Digest’s swing expert Luke Kerr-Dineen was actually fairly complimentary about Clark’s game on X. (Dana Dahlquist, a coach who’s worked with Bryson DeChambeau, had some more constructive feedback when asked by The Athletic.)
More specifically: they rank first (Mahomes) and second (Allen) in Cole’s projections of future quarterback efficiency (measured by Expected Points Added per play, with some adjustments).