Giving Tom Latham His Due As A World Class Test Match Opener
With a Test Championship Final in the near future, this Blackcaps Test side is getting rightfully celebrated. And what a team it is. Sure we’ve had plenty of excellent players throughout the long history of Test Cricket in Aotearoa but never have we had so many of them at the same time.
Sir Richard Hadlee for example. Once the all-time leading wicket taker in the sport. 431 wickets at an average of 22.29 during his 17 year Test career... only three other Blackcaps even took 100 wickets during the span of Hadlee’s career and none of those three (Lance Cairns 130, Ewen Chatfield 123 & John Bracewell 102) were even within ten runs of his average. Or how about the great man John R. Reid who when he retired from Tests was New Zealand’s leading run scorer, leading wicket taker, had taken the most catches, and played the most matches. Old mate even kept wicket a few times as a backup option on tour. He literally did everything.
Safe to say then that this kinda depth is unprecedented. The kind of depth where a 17-game unbeaten home streak occurs with the three strike-bowlers all taking within three wickets of each other while somebody like Kyle Jamieson can come in from outside that trio and utterly dominate. Same deal on the batting side where the entire top six (seven when CDG is around) have flirted with averages forty-plus. And we fans are only human, there’s only so much adoration we can spread around. Which explains why not enough people seem to be giving Tom Latham his due credit as one of the very best openers in Test cricket.
Admittedly this is not a particularly great time for opening batsmen. There’s no Hayden/Langer partnership anywhere in sight. Not even a Cook/Strauss combo. Cricket seems to be one of those sports that ebbs and flows like that and right now the best batsmen on the planet are mostly all batting at 3-4 for whatever reason. There’s David Warner, sure. But if you were gonna spark up some sort of World XI then a bloke with a record like Tom Latham is probably locking down that other opener position.
To check this idea, let us jump on the ever-brilliant Cricinfo Statsguru to check the numbers for openers in the last five years. Five years is a nice generic stretch of time, which keeps this experiment as blind and unbiased as possible – the sneaky thing to do would be to backdate it to the start of a Tom Latham golden spell just to boost him up but nah we’ll do this properly. Five years. Stuck on my eyes. Five years. What a surprise. We've got five years. My brain hurts a lot. Five years. That's all we've got.
This is what old mate Statsguru served up...
Right on. Rohit Sharma can probably be discounted for a small sample size (I set the minimum innings at 10 coz it’s still worth peeking at how well Sharma has done in his limited spots – it’s insane that he hasn’t played more Test cricket but scoring three tons in his first four innings as an opener in late-2019 has regained him a permanent spot). Mayank Agarwal has also only logged the 21 innings (23 in total in his career) and it’s tricky to judge him at this stage – he has two big double centuries, both in India, which combine for 43.5% of his total Test runs. Meanwhile he averages just 26.76 outside of India – including scoring just 78 runs in six innings in that recent series in Aussie.
Dimuth Karunaratne has the most runs in that time period but at an average under 40. Azhar Ali has a lovely average only a shade under fifty but he’s not actually an opener any more – sliding back down to 3 which is where he’s spent the bulk of his career. Curious one because his opener numbers are huge, including his triple century, and his slow and steady nature at the crease does seem to lend itself to openership but if you’re not opening then you’re not an opener, right? The difference is negligible for him anyway.
Azhar Ali as opener: 37 INNS | 1556 RUNS | 45.75 AVE | 4 100s
Azhar Ali at number 3: 109 INNS | 4553 RUNS | 43.77 AVE | 13 100s
Which brings us to David Warner, okey doke. He’s the first name that springs to mind when you thinking: world class opening batsmen... but he has had some struggles lately. Warner scored 95 runs in 10 innings in the last Ashes series, he scored 67 runs in 4 innings against India in the most recent series. Unfortunately in between that he plundered Pakistan with that unbeaten 335 as well as averaging 59.40 in the series against the Blackcaps so the slumps appear to be isolated things. He does feel more vulnerable than he once did, that’s for sure, but technically speaking his numbers since the suspension are only slightly behind what they were before it.
David Warner pre-Sandpaper: 137 INNS | 6363 RUNS | 48.20 AVE | 21 100s
David Warner post-Sandpaper: 22 INNS | 948 RUNS | 47.40 AVE | 3 100s
Steve Smith pre-Sandpaper: 117 INNS | 6199 RUNS | 61.37 AVE | 23 100s
Steve Smith post-Sandpaper: 22 INNS | 1341 RUNS | 63.85 AVE | 4 100s
Although take that 335no out of there for Warner and that post-paper average drops to 30.65. Which is cheating because that was a legit innings and those runs belong on his record. But that knock is doing a lot of heavy lifting there, to be fair.
Abid Ali is fresh on the scene. Alastair Cook has retired. Everyone else is sub-40 average with the exception of Dean Elgar of South Africa. A man with more runs in this time period than Latham as well as one more century... though in 10 additional turns at bat. Also the most ducks of anyone on the list (which doesn’t include the pair he got on debut batting at six). Full credit though, he’s on a current run of 12 straight innings with double figure scores including three fifties and a ton. And it’s away from home where he really thrives, over this five year period he’s scored four tons averaging 36.16 overseas – only Azhar Ali has a better average of those with relevant sample sizes. Elgar is the closest challenger to Latham, shrink the catchment to the last four years and Elgar is first in runs and centuries. Dude’s been grinding away and with Aidan Markram the Proteas have put together a really tough, gritty, reliable opening duo.
Then again, shrink it to three years and Tom Latham is the top opening run scorer and century maker as well as having the best average of anyone with more than ten innings. Latham has been a steady opening presence for the Blackcaps for more than six years now, he’s scored more runs at the opening position than any New Zealander other than John Wright (he’s 1360 runs behind – give him a couple more years). Eleven centuries including five scores of 150+... more than any other opener since his debut (Virender Sehwag has the opener’s record with 14 scores of 150+, while Sachin Tendulkar has the overall record as he scored 20 one-fiddies). 2020 was the only year of TL’s career in which he didn’t ton up however it was also the year he had the fewest innings at bat. For obvious reasons.
Latham has averaged 46.01 under the captaincy of Kane Williamson. He averages 47.02 in matches in Aotearoa. One of the most impressive things is that he’s scored more tons when NZ loses the toss than when we win it. Much more dominant in first innings (48.14 ave) than in second innings (33.71 ave) though that’s not the worst thing for an opener, whose job it is to set the game up and lay the platform. And oddly when he faces the first ball he averages 34.29 but when he starts at the non-striker’s end he’s a whopping 52.00. Tom Blundell’s gotta start taking one for the team there, aye? Speaking of, let’s look at what the man has done in combination...
Tom Latham Opening Partnerships:
Pity he didn’t crossover with Opening Bat B-Mac more but the standout there is that Tom Blundell is legitimately holding it down compared to the rest Latham’s buddies. Those 100/50 numbers are non-inclusive too so that means five partnerships of 50+ across 12 innings. That’s more than tidy. Blundell obviously doesn’t have the most natural skill set as an opener but fair cop there’s nothing wrong with the numbers. Not when paired with one of the world’s best.
Here’s one for ya: Tom Latham has multiple century partnerships for the opening wicket with three different partners, which is a kiwi record.
Blackcaps Top Opening Pairs By Runs:
Swinging it back around to Tom Latham and it’s actually been a quiet spell for him lately. Scores of 86, 27, 4, 53 & 33 over the home summer are more than decent but there’s nothing glorious in there like back in the 2018-19 season when he scored 150+ three times in four innings against Sri Lanka and Bangladesh (including his 264no which is the third highest score by an opener in these five years, behind Warner and Ali’s aforementioned triple-tons). Before that he had a high score of 52 in 10 innings against Australia and India.
All of which means he’s gone 16 innings since his last ten ton which for most players is nothing worth mentioning but for Tom Latham it’s the third longest drought of his career although four fifties in his last seven Test innings suggests he’s right on the edge. The next time he bats will be at Lords against England and there’s a spot just waiting for him on that honours board. Then not so long after that there’ll be a Test Championship Final.
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