The tale of two centuries ft. Virat Kohli and Jos Buttler

Virat Kohli played yet another long innings (against RR) and questions came up about how good or bad that innings was. Kohli, being who he is, induces millions of responses (including this one) with so much as a normal sneeze. A century takes the decibel of discourse to the polar opposite of what we heard in Ahmedabad stadium during the World Cup final. But in this match, Kohli was not the only centurion. Jos Buttler, too scored a century.

The match was a face-off between two players who are prolific century scorers in T20s. Since 2021, Virat has scored four centuries, while Buttler has scored seven. This is a lot, as per T20 standards. 

Back to the match. Buttler emerged as the winner of the face-off. I call it a face-off, but it might not be that at all. There is serious doubt about the intent of batters to aim for centuries in T20s. Let’s look closely at what transpired in this particular match. 

To start with, it is obvious that Kohli scored at a slower rate and hence he ended up on the losing side. There is no caveat here. In T20s, every dot ball or single is a stab in the chest of the team's win. In the graph below, you can see that somewhere around the 19th ball, the strike rate of Kohli started on a downward slide and Buttler’s started climbing. 

There was a phase where Kohli’s strike rate went below 110. As Kohli’s innings progressed, his strike rate kept getting worse. There was a recovery but all in all, he could manage a SR of somewhere around 150 and he played close to 70 balls. If you see Buttler’s SR graph, it hovered around the 180 mark throughout his innings post 21 balls. It came down in the end, but by then, the match was done and dusted. 

Buttler kept climbing. Kohli climbed early and kept falling. 

Was there anything different about these centuries? Was it a typical Kohli century or a typical Buttler century? What do we mean by a typical Kohli or Buttler century? We will look at Buttler first because his team won.

I broke down the innings into chunks of 10 balls each and checked the strike rate (SR) in every chunk. For this match, Buttler’s strike rate in different chunks was - 

Jos Buttler SR progression vs RCB 

This clearly says that he started slow, accelerated between 10 to 20 balls, slowed down a bit but not much (170 is a good SR), and then kept hovering around 200.

Now, let’s see the same trend for his other centuries since 2021 - 

Jos Buttler SR progression for T20 tons since 2021 

He usually starts slow, accelerates between 10 to 20 balls and then slows down again between 20 to 30 balls and finally starts climbing and never stops. Except for the last few balls, the trend is similar to his century in the RCB match. It seems like a typical Buttler century. 

You might be a nitpicker and say no, the trend is clearly different, but if we see Kohli’s trends, it will become clear that Buttler’s was closer to a typical Buttler century than Kohli’s was to his. Here’s Kohli’s break-up for the RR vs RCB match - 

Virat Kohli SR progression vs RR 

Virat Kohli SR progression for all T20 tons

He usually starts slow, then climbs to 190+ SR, stays at 160+ between 20 to 30 balls, comes down after that, but takes an almost vertical flight to 230+ SR post 40 balls. After playing 40 balls, he becomes a monster hitter. This is very different from the RR vs RCB match trend. 

This innings was uncharacteristic of Kohli because he couldn’t accelerate in any phase of his innings post 10 balls. He usually digs a hole for himself (low SR) in the first 10 balls and valiantly climbs out of it in the next few. In this innings, he started digging after 10 balls and kept digging until it was too late. 

There was another way in which this innings was uncharacteristic of a typical Kohli century. This is something I observed while watching the match. 

Between his 10th and 20th ball, when his SR plummeted, he was not tapping and running singles, which he usually does in other innings. He was actually trying to hit boundaries. There was only one ball on which he didn’t try to score more than 1 run. In this phase, against pacers, he tried twice to find the gap to the right of the backward point but couldn’t, once to the right of mid-off but couldn’t. Against Ashwin, he tried to beat the point fielder once, and in another one, he hit a bit straighter, which went into Ashwin’s hands. 

Even if one of these attempts would have come off, he would have been in mid 30s instead of 25 in 20 balls. He played five more balls in the powerplay and hit seven more runs. Add ten more to it, and he would have scored 40+ before five fielders were allowed to man the boundaries. I am not sure how this would have affected the rest of his innings, but it surely would have been a better century than the one he actually scored. 

In the same match, we saw two very different types of centuries. Of course, batters don’t perform in silos, and there are conditions, toss, and bowlers to consider. Also, this doesn’t answer any of the big questions about where the career trajectory of a cricket player is heading. But surely one’s allowed to have some fun with some trend lines, and question certain notions developed about the two centuries? 

Data source : cricsheet.org