MacGill on a roll, and the jinx of the top run-getter

Perhaps numbers never do reveal the full story, but they tell a large part of it. Every Friday, The Numbers Game will take a look at statistics from the present and the past, busting myths and revealing hidden truths:

The MacGill-Warne battle
Another Test when Shane Warne and Stuart MacGill played together, and another occasion when MacGill outperformed Warne quite comprehensively. The Sydney game against Pakistan, when MacGill managed 8 for 170 to Warne's 5 for 195, continued a trend: nine times the two have featured in the playing XI, and seven times MacGill has emerged with relatively greater success.

It began at Adelaide against South Africa in 1997-98, when MacGill, making his Test debut, managed 5 for 134 to Warne's 3 for 147. The next time the two played together, against England at Sydney in 1998-99, the contrast was even more stark: MacGill's matchwinning performance of 12 for 107 shone in comparison to Warne's lacklustre 2 for 110. In fact, on each of the first six occasions when the two played together, MacGill finished with better numbers. The trend was finally arrested in two matches in Sri Lanka last year, when Warne took 20 wickets and MacGill only five, before Sydney helped continue the sequence.

A comparison of stats between the two legspinners shows up MacGill in favourable light - his frequency of taking five-fors is much higher than Warne's, while the average is only slightly higher. Does that make MacGill as good a bowler as Warne? It doesn't, simply because Warne has done his stuff in all conditions and against all opponents (barring, to an extent, India), while MacGill has generally come into the fray only in conditions which suit spin bowling - 40 of his 160 wickets have come in seven matches at Sydney, which generally offers slow bowlers generous assistance. That doesn't detract from MacGill's performances - he has generally delivered whenever the team has needed him to - but unless he proves himself as an all-conditions bowler, he won't be classified among the top spinners in the game. And with Warne still going strong and Australia preferring a three-seamers-one-spinner attack, it seems unlikely that MacGill will get a sustained run in the near future. (Click here to see how Warne and MacGill have fared at each ground.)

The jinx of the top run-scorer
Justin Langer ended 2004 with a bang, and in the process became the leading run-scorer of the year, but if historical data is anything to go by, then Langer's performance might well drop away in 2005. As the table below demonstrates, five out of the last eight leading run-scorers saw a major slump in form in the year following their run-fest - with three of them, the drop was more than 40%.

The most recent example was that of the Australian captain Ricky Ponting, who had a fabulous 2003, scoring six hundreds - three of them double-centuries - and amassing 1503 runs at 100.20. In 2004, however, it went a bit flat as Ponting didn't manage a single three-digit score in Tests, and the average dropped by nearly 60%.

There are some others who have done a better job of defending their ground, though. For inspiration, Langer could do worse than look at his opening partner, Matthew Hayden - in 2001 he topped the run-scorers' chart and averaged 63, and the next year, though Michael Vaughan ended up with the highest number of runs, Hayden's batting average actually went up in comparison to the previous year.

S Rajesh is assistant editor of Cricinfo.