The Cricket Statistician No 195

27 The Growth of LBW by Douglas Miller S ome ten years ago (Spring 2011, no.153) I published an exhaustive analysis of trends in lbw dismissals across time. In the County Championship from 1946 through to 1969, such dismissals rarely strayed far from the overall average of 11.5%. Attempting to address a persistent problem of batsmen thrusting their leg outside the line of the stumps to pad the ball away, the law was changed in 1970 to allow a batsman to be out if he was playing no shot. However, as initially framed, this new law, perhaps unwittingly, gave the batsman additional protection: providing he was playing a shot he could now be struck in line with the stumps with impunity. Two years later, when the law as it stands today was introduced, this protection was confined to instances where a batsman is struck outside the line of the stumps. There was thus an initial hiccup in the long-standing trend with fewer batsmen, just 8.1%, ruled lbw in 1970 and 1971 followed by an upsurge to close to 15% of all dismissals, a figure that would accelerate in the new millennium as the influence of Hawkeye and DRS worked its way through the game, enabling Stephen Chalke in his Summer’s Crown to show a figure of 19.3% for the summers from 2000 to 2014. My earlier article was written at the end of the 2010 season in which there had been no fewer than three instances of matches with 18 lbws, where the previous record had stood at 17. I am now prompted to write by the setting of what I am assured is a new championship record of 19 such dismissals. This occurred in the match between Durham and Essex at the Riverside, which was umpired by David Millns and James Middlebrook. Earlier in the season an even higher proportion of wickets had fallen lbw when 18 of a match total of 32 wickets (56.25%) fell in this way in Glamorgan’s match against Sussex at Cardiff with Ben Debenham and Alex Wharf officiating. By 30 May the 65 matches completed had yielded 1827 dismissals, of which 459 had been lbw – a hitherto unprecedented 25.12%. The number of matches played makes it invidious to attach too much importance to identifying those umpires involved in matches where most lbws have been given, especially as there is no simple method of identifying which of the two officials raised the finger most often, but for what it may be worth the statistics are shown below. Matches LBWs Wkts Per Cent Mallender 5 52 151 34.44 Bainton 6 57 176 32.39 Millns 5 46 153 30.07 Saggers 5 35 120 29.17 Robinson 5 44 158 27.85 Debenham 5 39 141 27.66 Illingworth 6 40 152 26.32