Strike rate tells you almost nothing on its own

A number that treats the eighth over and the eighteenth as identical was never going to survive contact with a turning pitch.

Here is a scenario that gets scored the same way twice, wrongly. Batter A comes in at the fall of the second wicket in the fourth over, faces the newer ball swinging both ways, and grinds out 42 off 38. Batter B walks in at 140 for 3 in the sixteenth, the field is spread, the bowler is a part-timer with one over left, and he makes 24 off 13. On the scorecard B has the better strike rate by a mile. In the match he did less.

We all know this. We keep quoting the raw number anyway.

The fix isn't complicated, it's just unglamorous. You compare a batter's scoring rate to what the rest of that match managed in the same overs, on that surface, against that kind of bowling. Call it phase-adjusted if you like. A 118 strike rate through overs seven to fourteen on a dry, gripping pitch where the game average in that window is 96 is a better innings than 165 in a powerplay on a road.

What annoys me is how selection meetings still work. A player gets dropped because his T20 strike rate reads 124 and the coaching staff want 140. Nobody asks where he batted. Anchors are being pushed out of sides for the crime of being sent in during the hardest phase of the innings and then judged by a metric built for the easiest one.

There's a second problem, and it's about balls faced. Strike rate over a small sample is mostly noise. Twelve deliveries with two boundaries and you look like a destroyer. Twelve deliveries with two dots at the wrong end of the over and you look finished. Careers have turned on samples that small.

Then there's the thing the number actively hides. Dot-ball percentage against spin in the middle overs is, to my eye, the most predictive single figure you can look at for a middle-order batter. It survives on slow pitches. It travels. Strike rate doesn't travel at all, because it is a product of conditions as much as of the player.

So keep the number. Print it. Just stop treating it as a verdict. It is the beginning of a question, not the answer to one, and any analyst who leads with it uncontextualised is telling you they didn't watch the innings.