Batting average should not exist in this format at all

Not-outs inflate the finishers, punish the openers, and produce a number that describes nothing anybody in the dugout cares about.

A batter comes in at number seven in the eighteenth over, faces nine balls, hits twenty-two and is there at the end. Not out. He does that eight times in a season, gets dismissed four times, and finishes with an average somewhere in the forties. On paper he is one of the most reliable batters in the competition.

He is not. He is a useful finisher who has been handed a statistical gift by the fact that innings end, and by the fact that batting last in the order means most of your visits do not end in a dismissal.

Meanwhile the opener who faces the new ball forty times, gets out thirty of them because that is what happens when you face genuine pace with two men out, and scores at a ferocious clip, averages in the twenties and gets described as inconsistent.

Average was built for a format where you bat until you are out and the number of innings is the natural unit. In a game of a hundred and twenty balls, where the scarce resource is deliveries rather than wickets, dividing runs by dismissals answers a question nobody is asking.

Balls per dismissal is better and barely used. It tells you how long a batter survives, which combined with strike rate gives you the two things that actually matter: how fast he scores and how long he lasts. Multiply them and you have something close to expected runs contributed per innings, which is at least a quantity a coach could use when deciding whether to promote someone.

Even that has holes. It does not know about match situation, does not know whether the pitch was a raging turner or a road, does not know that a batter facing a specific spinner is a mismatch. But it is not actively misleading, and average is.

The reason average persists is inertia and comparability. It is the number cricket has always used, it lets people argue across eras and formats, and scorecards have a column for it. Nobody is going to redesign the scorecard.

So I will settle for a smaller ask. When somebody quotes a T20 average at you in an argument about selection, ask how many not-outs are in it and where in the order those innings came. Roughly half the time the number falls apart on the spot, and the conversation becomes a better one.