Cricket has generally got more time for stats than for its own personal hygiene, yet those for Twenty20 are surprisingly useless.
A good batting average can be counterproductive if not allied to a decent strike-rate. A decent bowling economy rate can be misleading if it’s just the result of that player’s batting colleagues failing to ever set a challenging score. Wickets aren’t quite so important in a format where teams are rarely bowled out.
Yet we need something
We flatly refuse to watch much of the Friends Provident T20 because there are 10 billion matches and because half of them are overshadowed by Tests. Statistics are our fall-back.
We have concluded that the number of runs a player has scored is a half-decent measure of their worth (even if it does favour top-order batsmen).
Top scorers
Adam Voges has so far scored most runs in this season’s Twenty20 Cup. We don’t care about him because he’s Australian and also because he pronounces his name ‘Vo-jizz,’ which is clearly wrong.
The second highest scorer is Phil Mustard, so we can state with some certainty that in terms of Twenty20 cricket this year, Phil Mustard is the best-performing beef-eating, gout-suffering, Durham wicketkeeper-batsman named as one to watch in 2011 on this website.
No, wait, we’re wrong. We said you should watch him last year. Also, we forgot that this year’s ones to watch related only to performances in the top division of the County Championship. We probably can’t blame statistics for those errors, but might do so anyway.
So much of what’s wrong with English cricket can be seen in the never-ending debate about wicketkeepers. First-class cricket’s too weak to show who’s best and because there are so many counties and therefore so many candidates, no player gets much of a run.
Although we made 
So Phil Mustard’s dropping the balls into the bowling machine and Kevin Pietersen’s driving the ball. Pietersen gets hold of one and Mustard takes it in the face.
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