A strike rate without a phase attached to it is just noise

The same number means opposite things depending on which over you walked in, and we keep printing it as though it did not.

Somebody finishes a season with a strike rate of a hundred and forty. Good, obviously. But a hundred and forty as an opener facing the first six overs with two fielders out and a hard new ball is roughly an average return. A hundred and forty batting at six, arriving in the sixteenth over with the field spread and the ball soft, is close to a disaster, because that is a phase where the expectation is closer to a hundred and eighty and every ball you use up at a lower rate is a ball taken from someone who could have used it better.

Same number. Completely different verdicts.

The usefulness of a strike rate depends entirely on what the alternative was at that moment. In the powerplay the alternative is limited, because you have to survive, the ball is doing something and only two fielders are out. Runs there are genuinely hard and a batter who scores at a hundred and thirty through the field restrictions has probably done well. Between overs seven and fifteen the ball is old, the field is spread, and the alternative is a comfortable rotation of strike, so scoring at a hundred and twenty is close to worthless and scoring at a hundred and sixty is exceptional. At the death nothing under a hundred and seventy really moves the needle.

So the number you actually want is the difference between what a batter scored and what the average batter has historically scored in that phase, on that kind of surface, against that kind of bowling. Most serious analysis departments have some version of this. It never makes the broadcast graphic, because it requires a sentence of explanation and the graphic has three seconds.

There is a second problem, which is that strike rate treats all thirty balls of an innings as one lump. A player who faces fifteen balls for eight runs while getting his eye in and then hits fifty off the next twenty ends up at a fine overall figure, and the fifteen balls he burned were paid for by somebody else. That cost is invisible.

I am not arguing for abolishing strike rate. It is the least bad single number we have in this format. I am arguing that quoting a career strike rate as though it settles an argument about whether a middle-order batter is any good is lazy, and it has cost several genuinely useful cricketers their places while protecting a few very comfortable ones.