Explainer
Bowling Average vs Strike Rate: Runs and Balls a Wicket
Bowling average is runs per wicket, strike rate is balls per wicket and economy is runs per over. Average equals economy times strike rate, divided by six.
By CricketTaken EditorialPublished Updated Explainer18 min read
A bowler's line on a scorecard ends in three numbers, and almost everybody reads them as three grades. They are not grades. Bowling economy, average and strike rate are three answers to three different questions, assembled from the same three raw quantities, and the useful part is the arithmetic that binds them together. Runs per over. Runs per wicket. Balls per wicket. Get the relationship between those three straight and most arguments about which bowler is better turn out to be arguments about which question the match is asking.
The three questions, stated plainly:
- Economy rate: how many runs does this bowler concede per over?
- Bowling average: how many runs does it cost this bowler to take a wicket?
- Bowling strike rate: how many deliveries does this bowler need to take a wicket?
A batter's card carries two headline figures. A bowler's carries three, and the third one is why bowling statistics are harder to read than the average and strike rate a batter is judged on. Three figures make three pairwise comparisons, and two bowlers can agree on one of them while disagreeing violently about the other two.
Three raw numbers, and the three ways to divide them
Everything on a bowling card comes from three counts: balls bowled, runs conceded, wickets taken. Nothing else is measured. Maidens are derived, overs are balls divided by six, and the three summary figures are ratios of the three counts taken two at a time.
Three quantities give six possible ratios. Cricket uses three of them and throws the reciprocals away, purely because they read better. Wickets per ball would be a perfectly serviceable measure of wicket-taking, and it is never used, because a good bowler would have a figure of about 0.02 and nobody can hold a number like that in their head. Overs per wicket is discarded in favour of balls per wicket for the same reason: integers beat decimals. The choice of which way up to write each ratio is presentational, and it is worth knowing that, because the direction of "good" flips between the three figures for no deeper reason than typography.
Economy rate is runs conceded divided by overs bowled. A bowler who concedes 32 in eight overs has an economy of 4.00.
The arithmetic has one trap and it catches people constantly. Overs are counted in sixths, not tenths. A figure of 9.3 means nine overs and three balls, which is nine and a half overs. Divide runs by 9.3 and the answer is wrong. Convert the part-over to a fraction of six first: 9.3 becomes 9.5, 7.2 becomes 7.333, 4.4 becomes 4.667. Any economy calculated straight from the decimal printed on the card comes out slightly too high, and the error grows as the spell gets shorter.
Economy is the only one of the three that ignores wickets entirely. It is a pure containment figure. A bowler can have an outstanding economy and no wickets at all, and in certain roles that is precisely what the captain asked for.
Bowling average is runs conceded divided by wickets taken. A bowler who concedes 240 and takes eight averages 30. It is the mirror of the batting average and it is read the opposite way round: low is good.
Two structural points about it matter. The first is that it has no not-out problem. Unlike the batting average, there is no partial innings to exclude and no denominator distortion built into the definition. Every run conceded and every wicket taken enters at full weight, which makes the bowling average arithmetically the cleanest of the six headline figures in the sport.
The second is that it is violently unstable at low wicket counts. A bowler with two wickets from a heavy workload has an average sitting on a denominator of two, and the next wicket moves it by a third. Averages need volume before they mean anything, and a spectacular figure from a handful of matches is nearly always a sample-size artefact rather than a discovery.
Bowling strike rate is balls bowled divided by wickets taken. A bowler who sends down 300 legal deliveries for six wickets has a strike rate of 50: a wicket every fifty balls, or a shade over every eight overs.
Note the direction again. Batting strike rate is runs per hundred balls and higher is better. Bowling strike rate is balls per wicket and lower is better. They share a name and share nothing else, and readers new to a statistics page routinely read one as the other. If you find yourself unsure which convention a table is using, the glossary of cricket statistics terms sets out which way round each one runs.
The identity: bowling average is economy times strike rate, divided by six
This is the spine of the whole subject and most explainers never state it.
Write the three definitions with their symbols. Let R be runs conceded, B be balls bowled, W be wickets taken, and O be overs, which is B divided by 6.
- Average = R ÷ W
- Economy = R ÷ O = 6R ÷ B
- Strike rate = B ÷ W
Multiply economy by strike rate:
Economy × strike rate = (6R ÷ B) × (B ÷ W) = 6R ÷ W
The balls cancel. What is left is six times runs per wicket, which is six times the average. So:
Bowling average = (economy rate × strike rate) ÷ 6
Read in plain English it is almost obvious once seen. Runs per wicket equals runs per over multiplied by overs per wicket. Overs per wicket is just the strike rate divided by six. The division by six is nothing more than the conversion from balls to overs, and if you prefer to skip it entirely, the cleaner form is:
Bowling average = economy rate × overs per wicket
Three consequences follow, and each is useful.
Any two of the three figures give you the third exactly. A card printing all three has one redundant column. Rearranged: economy = 6 × average ÷ strike rate, and strike rate = 6 × average ÷ economy. If a statistics page ever shows three figures that do not satisfy the identity, one of them is wrong, or the page is rounding somewhere it should not.
There are exactly two routes to a lower average, and they are different skills. A bowler improves their average either by conceding less per over or by striking more often. Accuracy and control lower the first factor. Pace, movement and deception lower the second. The average merges them into a single price and, in doing so, destroys the information about which one the bowler actually has.
The average is a product, so identical averages can be built from wildly different factors. That is the next section, and it is the point of the whole piece.
What it means when two bowlers share a bowling average
Take the two invented bowlers above. Bowler A concedes 2.5 an over and takes a wicket every twelve overs. Bowler B concedes 5.0 an over and takes a wicket every six. Both average 30. The average says they are equivalent. The identity says they are equivalent only in the sense that a long cheap route and a short expensive route can cost the same money.
Now put each of them into a format and let the constraint decide.
In a Test. Suppose an attack made entirely of A-types and an attack made entirely of B-types each has to take twenty wickets. Twenty wickets at an average of 30 costs 600 runs either way, because that is what an identical average means. The runs are the same. The overs are not. The A-attack needs 240 bowler-overs to get there. The B-attack needs 120. In a match with a fixed number of days, and weather that does not consult anybody, a hundred and twenty overs of slack is an enormous difference. The B-attack has bought the same wickets for the same runs and handed its batters two extra sessions and its captain a buffer against rain. On the same average, the higher strike rate wins.
In a Twenty20. Now the innings terminates at 120 balls regardless of what anyone does. The A-attack, bowling twenty overs at 2.5, concedes 50. The B-attack concedes 100. The B-attack takes more wickets, roughly three to A's one and a half, but the extra wickets did not shorten the innings, because nothing was going to shorten it. Fifty runs is a match. On the same average, the lower economy wins, and it is not close.
Same two bowlers. Same average. Opposite verdicts, and both verdicts fall straight out of the arithmetic rather than out of anybody's opinion.
This is worth being blunt about. A bowling average on its own is not a wrong number, it is an incomplete one, and it is incomplete in a specific and recoverable way: it has multiplied two factors together and thrown away the factorisation. Publishing the average alone is like quoting the area of a room without saying whether it is long and narrow or nearly square. Some questions only care about the area. Most do not.
The honest reading of the average is that it prices a wicket. That is genuinely what a captain wants to know when deciding whether to keep a bowler on in a Test with the game in the balance. The dishonest reading is that it ranks bowlers, which it cannot do without a format, a role and a phase attached to it.
Why a Test rewards strike rate and a T20 rewards economy
The rule underneath the format argument is short: the figure that matters is denominated in whatever the innings is about to run out of.
A Test innings ends when ten wickets are gone. Nothing else ends it, short of a declaration. A Test match is won by taking twenty wickets, and a side that cannot take twenty cannot win however few runs it concedes. Balls are not the terminating condition for an innings, but they are the terminating condition for the match: five days contain a finite supply of overs, and every over spent not taking a wicket is an over gone. So the currency is wickets and the constraint is time, which makes wickets-per-unit-of-time the figure that decides matches. That is the strike rate, and it is the reason a genuinely fast bowler with a moderate economy is often worth more to a Test attack than an accurate one with a better economy and a longer strike rate.
A Twenty20 innings ends after 120 balls. Wickets do not end it, they only inconvenience the batting side, and by the closing overs they barely do that. The supply of balls is fixed and known before the toss. So the only thing a fielding side can actually influence is how many runs come off those 120 balls, and the figure denominated in runs per ball is the economy rate. Wickets still matter in a T20, but instrumentally: they matter because a new batter scores more slowly for a few deliveries, which is a runs argument wearing a wickets costume.
The fifty-over game genuinely sits in between, and that is why it is the hardest format to rate a bowler in with a single figure. Fifty overs is long enough that being bowled out is a real risk, so wickets have terminating power, and short enough that the balls run out too. Both constraints bind. Good analysis of one-day bowling almost always splits the innings into phases rather than trying to compress it into one number.
| Format | What the innings runs out of | Primary figure | Secondary |
|---|---|---|---|
| Test | Wickets, and the days available to take them | Strike rate | Average, then economy |
| One-day international | Both balls and wickets, genuinely | Average and economy read together | Strike rate in the middle overs |
| Twenty20 | Balls, almost entirely | Economy | Strike rate in the powerplay |
| Death overs, any white-ball format | Balls, entirely | Economy | Dot-ball percentage |
| Powerplay, white-ball | Early wickets against attacking batting | Strike rate | Economy |
One consequence deserves stating on its own. Economy rates and averages are not comparable across formats at all. An economy that would be poor in a Test is excellent in a T20. An average that would be routine in a T20 would be extraordinary in a Test. Any table that ranks bowlers across formats on a raw figure is producing nonsense with a straight face, and the identity explains why: the two factors move in opposite directions between formats, and the product tells you about the format rather than the bowler.
One over, and what it does to economy, average and strike rate
The three figures respond differently to the same delivery, and watching one over move all three is the fastest way to feel how they work. What follows is an invented spell, constructed for round numbers.
- Before the over6 overs, 24 runs, 1 wicket. Economy 4.00, average 24.0, strike rate 36.0.
- Ball one, a dot24 runs off 37 balls. Economy drops to 3.89, average is untouched at 24.0, and the strike rate drifts out to 37.0. A dot improves one figure, worsens one, and leaves one alone.
- Ball two, driven for four28 runs off 38 balls. Economy 4.42, average 28.0, strike rate 38.0. A boundary is the only outcome that damages all three at once.
- A wide, called and re-bowled29 runs, still 38 balls. Economy 4.58 and average 29.0, both worse. The strike rate does not move, because a wide is not a ball bowled.
- Balls three and four, a dot then bowled29 runs off 40 balls, 2 wickets. Economy 4.35, average 14.5, strike rate 20.0. One delivery has roughly halved two of the three figures.
- Balls five and six, two runs then a dot31 runs off 42 balls, 2 wickets. Economy 4.43, average 15.5, strike rate 21.0. The over reads 1-0-7-1.
- Check the identity4.43 multiplied by 21, divided by 6, is 15.5. The three figures cannot disagree, because two of them determine the third.
A constructed spell. The bowler starts with figures of 6-0-24-1 and finishes the over with 7-0-31-2. No real bowler or match is being described.
Set out as a table, the asymmetries are stark:
| Outcome | Economy | Average | Strike rate |
|---|---|---|---|
| Dot ball | Improves | Unchanged | Worsens |
| Single | Worsens slightly | Worsens | Worsens |
| Boundary four | Worsens | Worsens | Worsens |
| Wide, nothing run | Worsens | Worsens | Unchanged |
| No ball, nothing off the bat | Worsens | Worsens | Unchanged |
| Bye or leg bye | Improves | Unchanged | Worsens |
| Wicket, no run scored | Improves | Improves | Improves |
Two rows in that table repay a second look.
The bye row is the strangest thing on a bowling card. Four byes cost the fielding side four runs, and in the bowler's ledger they are indistinguishable from a dot ball: the economy improves by exactly as much as if nobody had scored, because no runs are charged and an over has advanced. A wicketkeeper having a poor day makes every bowler's economy look marginally better while the team's total climbs.
The wide row shows why a wide costs more than the run it appears to cost. The delivery is charged one run and must be bowled again, so the bowler pays the run plus the expected value of the extra delivery. If the bowler is going at six an over, that is a run a ball, so a single wide really costs about two runs rather than one. In a format where the going rate per ball is higher, the wide costs more still. The scoreboard shows a one. The economy rate feels the two.
Economy is the most context-dependent figure on the card
Of the three, economy is the one that most needs a caption saying when the bowler bowled. It varies more by phase than by bowler.
Consider the three phases of a Twenty20 innings from the batting side's point of view. In the powerplay, fielding restrictions keep most of the side inside the circle, which makes boundaries available, but the ball is new and hard and the batters still have an innings to lose. In the middle overs, the field spreads, the ball has softened, spin usually arrives, and the batting side takes singles it does not want because the alternative is a risk against a set field. In the last few overs, the batting side has run out of reasons to protect anything. A dismissal costs it almost nothing, because there is barely any innings left to lose, so it swings at everything.
The shape matters more than the numbers. Bowling at the death is played against a much higher baseline than bowling at the start, and that baseline has nothing to do with the bowler's skill. Two bowlers finishing a season on the same economy have not necessarily done the same job, and comparing a new-ball bowler's economy with a death bowler's without saying which overs each of them bowled is not a comparison at all. It is a category error dressed up as a table.
This is why death bowling is a distinct specialism, and why every skill in it is containment-first: the yorker, the wide yorker, the slower ball, the bouncer as a change-up, and above all the ability to repeat a length under pressure to a field set for a single rather than for a wicket. A death bowler's economy is the figure that says whether they can do the job. Their career average, accumulated across the most expensive overs in the sport, will look poor against a colleague who bowls the first six, and that comparison is close to meaningless.
Three other things move a bowler's economy that the bowler does not control.
The field. A captain who sets a run-saving field concedes fewer boundaries and more singles. A captain who sets an attacking field does the reverse. The economy rate records the outcome of a decision the bowler did not make.
The other end. A batting side that has decided to take on a particular bowler will milk singles off him and attack the other. Economy figures record which bowler the opposition chose to attack as much as which bowler was harder to score off.
The match situation. Bowling to a side needing 90 off 30 balls produces a different economy from bowling to a side needing 20 off 30, from identical deliveries. In the first case every batter is swinging. In the second nobody is.
Where economy earns its keep is in phase-matched comparison: this bowler against that bowler, in the same phase, against comparable opposition. That comparison is available in ball-by-ball data and is not available on a scorecard, which is a large part of why analysts inside professional teams work from ball-by-ball records rather than from summary figures.
Which extras are charged to the bowler, and which are not
All three figures depend on runs conceded, and runs conceded is not the same as runs scored while the bowler was operating. The rule is one of responsibility: the bowler is charged with the runs their delivery was at fault for.
Charged to the bowler:
- Runs scored off the bat, including boundaries.
- Wides. One run for the wide itself, plus anything run from it and any boundary that results. The delivery was out of the batter's reach as they stood, which is the bowler's error, and the ball is bowled again.
- No balls. One run for the no ball, plus anything scored off the bat from that delivery. An overstep, a dangerous full toss above waist height, too many bouncers in the over and a range of technical breaches all produce a no ball, and every one of them is the bowler's responsibility. The ball is bowled again, and in white-ball cricket a free hit usually follows, which is a second penalty the figures never separate out.
- Overthrows arising from the delivery, which are added to the runs from that ball.
Not charged to the bowler:
- Byes. The ball passed bat and keeper without touching either and the batters ran. Legal delivery, no contact. The runs go on the team total and into nobody's analysis.
- Leg byes. The ball struck the batter's body rather than the bat and the batters ran. Legal delivery, no contact with the bat, so nothing is charged. Leg byes are only allowed if the batter was attempting a stroke or trying to avoid the ball.
- Penalty runs. Five-run penalties, for offences such as the ball striking a fielding helmet left on the ground or deliberate damage to the pitch, sit against the fielding side and against no individual.
- Off the bat, charged to bowlers268
- Wides and no balls, charged to bowlers12
- Byes, leg byes and penalties, charged to nobody20
A constructed innings. The bowlers' runs-conceded column adds up to 280, and the missing 20 is exactly the byes, leg byes and penalties.
Show the numbers
| Item | Value |
|---|---|
| Off the bat, charged to bowlers | 268 |
| Wides and no balls, charged to bowlers | 12 |
| Byes, leg byes and penalties, charged to nobody | 20 |
This is why the runs-conceded column almost never adds up to the team total. Subtract the sum of the bowling figures from the total and the difference is exactly the byes, leg byes and penalties. If you are reconciling a card by hand and the numbers refuse to meet, that gap is where the missing runs live, and the anatomy of a scorecard sets out which column carries which.
The same responsibility rule governs maidens. A maiden is an over from which no runs are charged to the bowler. Byes and leg byes during the over do not spoil it, because they are not the bowler's runs. A wide or a no ball does spoil it, because they are. An over in which a wicket also falls and nothing is charged is a wicket maiden, and some cards give it its own column.
There is a quiet unfairness in all this that is worth naming. A bowler operating to a keeper standing up to the stumps concedes more byes and pays for none of them. A bowler whose captain sets a deep-set field concedes more singles and pays for all of them. The charging rules are precise about fault at the moment of delivery and silent about everything that happens around it.
The wicket-taking figures a scorecard never shows
The card is a legal record of what happened in a match. It was never designed as an analytical instrument, and the figures that best describe a bowler are mostly not on it.
Dot-ball percentage. The proportion of legal deliveries from which no runs are scored. In white-ball cricket it is often a better description of a bowler's containment than the economy rate, because it separates a bowler who concedes a steady stream of singles from one who alternates dots and boundaries. Two identical economy rates can come from completely different distributions, and the distribution is what the batting side actually experiences.
False shot percentage, sometimes called control percentage. The proportion of deliveries on which the batter did not middle the ball as intended: an edge, a play and a miss, a mis-hit, a leading edge. It is coded by hand or by tracking software rather than computed from the scorecard, and it is the closest thing the sport has to a measure of how well a bowler bowled independent of whether the outcome went their way. A bowler who induces false shots at a high rate and has nothing in the wicket column has usually been unlucky rather than ineffective, and the false shot rate is what tells you so.
Average length, and the variation around it. Ball-tracking gives the pitching point of every delivery, which makes it possible to describe a bowler by where they land it and, more usefully, by how tightly they cluster. Two bowlers with the same average length can be a metronome and a lottery. The spread is the skill.
Beaten-the-bat counts, edges, and the shot the batter played. These fill in the gap between a good ball and a wicket, which is the gap the scorecard silently attributes to the bowler in one direction and to nobody in the other.
Boundary percentage conceded, phase economy, and wickets by batting position dismissed. A bowler used mainly against the tail carries figures that flatter them, and nothing on the card distinguishes a top-order wicket from a number eleven.
Movement measurements. Degrees of swing, degrees of seam, revolutions on the ball, release speed. These describe what the delivery did rather than what happened next. A spell of reverse swing shows up in the movement data and in the false shot rate long before it shows up in the wicket column, and a spell that ends wicketless can still be the spell that broke the batting side.
None of this is available from the card, and most of it is proprietary. That is the honest position: the best public description of a bowler is three ratios computed from three counts, and the best private description is several dozen measurements taken from every delivery. The gap between those two is where most disagreements about bowlers actually live.
Partnership bowling, and the wicket credited to the wrong end
A bowling attack is not four independent contractors. It is a system with two ends, and the figures are recorded per contractor.
The mechanism is straightforward and everyone who has played the game knows it. One bowler builds pressure at one end: dot balls, no width, a field that offers nothing, an over that goes for one. The batter's required rate creeps, or in a Test the frustration builds, and the batter decides that the runs must come from the other end. They take on the bowler at the other end and get out.
The wicket goes in the second bowler's column. All three of his figures improve. Not one of the first bowler's figures moves at all, except the economy rate, which improves by the small amount that any tidy over improves it. The pressure that produced the dismissal is attributed entirely to the bowler who happened to be operating when the batter cracked.
This shows up everywhere in cricket and it is why attacks are constructed rather than assembled. A Test attack usually wants one bowler who dries up an end and one who is genuinely dangerous, because the first makes the second's wickets available. Four containers can bowl all day without looking like taking a wicket. Four strike bowlers leak from both ends and give the batters somewhere safe to score. The same logic drives spin pairings, where the two bowlers are chosen to ask opposite questions: the different types of spin bowling exist partly because a left-arm orthodox turning the ball away from a right-hander and a leg-spinner turning it in are more dangerous in sequence than either is alone.
There is no individual figure that captures any of this, and the attempts are all partial. Analysts look at dot balls in the overs preceding a wicket, at run rate in the passage before a dismissal, at how a batter's scoring rate against one bowler shifts after facing another. All of these are proxies, they all require ball-by-ball data, and none of them ends up on a card.
The practical consequence is a systematic transfer. The accurate bowler's figures subsidise the strike bowler's. Over a career, the container's average is worse than his contribution and the strike bowler's is better than his, and the sport has no mechanism for correcting the transfer because the wicket has to be credited to somebody and the Laws credit it to the bowler who delivered it.
Fielders, the wicketkeeper and the captain sit in the same blind spot. A bowler who beat the edge four times and had two catches put down is indistinguishable on the card from a bowler who bowled badly. The wicket column is the entire difference between the two.
Workload, and why an average detached from overs flatters the specialist
A bowling average says what a wicket cost. It says nothing about how many overs the bowler was willing or able to bowl to get it, and that omission is the single largest distortion in comparing bowlers.
Consider two Test bowlers over a series. One bowls twelve overs a day, in short sharp bursts, always fresh, always with the wind, and averages 25. The other bowls twenty-five overs a day, takes the long spells into the wind, bowls the holding overs before lunch on a flat fourth day, and averages 28. The second bowler has the worse average and is almost certainly the more valuable member of the attack, because he is the reason the first one gets to bowl fresh.
The mechanism is not subtle. A bowler's economy and strike rate both deteriorate as a spell lengthens, so a bowler who only ever bowls his best four overs has a structural advantage in every figure over a bowler who bowls his best four and then six more. Overs bowled belongs next to the average, and it is almost never printed there.
The same distortion produces the part-timer's flattering line. A batter who bowls three overs a match, always when a partnership is already broken or a declaration is coming, accumulates a small sample of unpressured overs and can carry a career average that a frontline bowler would envy. The average is real. It is also the average of a bowler nobody would give the new ball to.
In white-ball cricket the specialist problem is sharper still, because the roles are shorter and more clearly defined. A T20 bowler who bowls four overs in the powerplay and a bowler who bowls two at the start and two at the death have done incomparable jobs, and their season figures sit in the same column. The captain's plan shapes the numbers as much as the bowler's skill.
Three things to look for alongside any bowling average:
- Overs per match, or overs per innings. It is the closest public proxy for whether the captain trusts this bowler with the difficult overs.
- Spell length, where the ball-by-ball data is available. A bowler whose figures collapse after the fifth over of a spell is a different asset from one whose figures do not.
- Whether the bowler finished matches. Bowlers who break down, are rested, or are managed through series accumulate averages from their best conditions only.
None of this makes a low average meaningless. It makes a low average a question rather than an answer: cheap wickets, yes, but how many overs did the side get out of him, and which overs were they?
Conditions and era: what a bowling average from another decade actually compares
A bowling average is a measurement of a bowler in an environment. Change the environment and the number moves without the bowler changing at all.
The environment has changed repeatedly and in one direction. Pitches are covered and drained. Outfields are faster, so shots that once ran three now run four. Bats have thicker edges and larger sweet spots, which converts mis-hits into boundaries. Boundary ropes are frequently brought in from the fence. White-ball fielding restrictions have been rewritten more than once. One-day cricket has used two new balls from opposite ends, which changes how much a ball can be made to reverse. The review system has altered how leg before wicket is adjudicated, which changes what a full straight ball is worth. Over rates have fallen, which changes how many deliveries a day contains.
Every one of those shifts moves the average of every bowler playing under it, and none of them says anything about the bowlers.
So the honest answer to the question people actually want to ask is unwelcome: comparing a bowling average from one decade with one from another compares two environments and only incidentally two bowlers. The comparison is not meaningless, it is just not the comparison people think they are making.
What can be done is comparison within an environment. A bowler's average set against the overall runs-per-wicket figure for the matches they actually played in is a far more defensible statement than the raw number, because the denominator absorbs the conditions. The same logic applies at a smaller scale to home and away splits, which are the cheapest useful adjustment available on a public statistics page: a bowler whose average is excellent at home and ordinary away has told you something specific about which conditions their method needs.
Attempts at full era-standardisation exist and they all involve judgement about what to normalise against, which means they can be argued with. That is fine. An adjusted figure you can argue with beats an unadjusted one that quietly pretends the conditions were the same.
The all-rounder's difference figure
There is a fourth number that occasionally appears, usually in arguments about all-rounders: batting average minus bowling average. Positive is good, and the larger the gap the stronger the claim.
It is a reasonable first filter and a poor second one. Both averages are volatile, they sit on different denominators, and they are not measured in comparable units of value: a run scored and a run conceded are equivalent only in a very abstract sense, and neither accounts for when in the match it happened. The figure also ignores volume completely, so a batter who bowls occasionally and a genuine two-discipline cricketer can produce similar differences from entirely different careers.
Read it as a rough sorting device, not as a verdict. What it does not tell you at all is the thing selectors actually need to know: whether the player would be picked for either discipline alone.
How to read a bowling analysis properly
A short routine gets most of the value out of the three figures and avoids most of the traps.
- Establish the format and the role before looking at any number. Death bowler, powerplay bowler, Test strike bowler and Test container are four different jobs with four different correct-looking sets of figures.
- Check the balls bowled first. All three measures are volatile over small workloads, and the average is the most volatile of them.
- Read economy and strike rate as a pair, then read the average. The pair tells you what kind of bowler this is. The average only tells you the combined price.
- Apply the identity as a sanity check. Economy times strike rate divided by six should equal the average. When it does not, something in the table is wrong.
- Convert part-overs before doing any arithmetic yourself. Sixths, not tenths.
- Ask which overs these were. An economy rate without a phase attached is a number without a question attached.
- Remember the runs column excludes byes, leg byes and penalties. That is where a card that will not reconcile is hiding its runs.
- Never compare across formats, and preferably not across eras. Compare Test with Test, T20 with T20, phase with phase, and where possible bowler with the conditions they bowled in.
None of the three numbers is a verdict, and each is most useful read as the answer to its own narrow question rather than as a score out of ten. The bowler with the best average in a squad is not automatically the best bowler in it, and in a Twenty20 side he is frequently not even the most important one.
The one thing to carry away is the identity. Average equals economy multiplied by strike rate, divided by six. Once that is in your head, a bowling average stops being a rating and becomes what it always was: a product of two more informative numbers, one of which the format has already told you to care about. More explainers of this kind, on this sport and others, are collected in the cricket archive.
Common questions
How do you calculate bowling strike rate?
Divide the number of balls the bowler has delivered by the number of wickets they have taken. A bowler who has sent down 300 legal deliveries and taken six wickets has a strike rate of 50, meaning a wicket every fifty balls. Lower is better, which is the opposite of batting strike rate, and wides and no balls do not count towards the balls bowled.
What is the relationship between bowling average, economy and strike rate?
Bowling average equals economy rate multiplied by strike rate and divided by six. Runs per wicket is simply runs per over multiplied by overs per wicket, and overs per wicket is the strike rate in balls divided by six. Because the three figures are locked together by that identity, any two of them give you the third exactly.
Is bowling average or strike rate more important?
It depends entirely on what the innings runs out of first. A Test side must take twenty wickets and has a fixed number of days to do it, so wicket-taking frequency, which is strike rate, is the binding figure. A Twenty20 innings ends after 120 balls whether wickets fall or not, so runs conceded per over is what actually decides the game.
Are wides and no balls charged to the bowler?
Yes. A wide costs the bowler one run plus anything run or scored from it, and a no ball costs one run plus anything hit off the bat, and neither counts as a legal ball, so both must be bowled again. Byes, leg byes and five-run penalties are not charged to any bowler, which is why the bowling figures on a scorecard never add up to the team total.
Why do death bowlers have worse economy rates than new-ball bowlers?
Because the batting side has stopped protecting its wickets by then and is swinging at almost everything, and a dismissal costs it very little with only a few balls left. A death bowler is judged against a much higher baseline scoring rate than a powerplay bowler, so comparing their economy rates without saying which overs each one bowled compares two different jobs rather than two bowlers.
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