Ah Guppy. There aren’t many more polarising cricketers out there than Martin Guptill, genuine good dude and occasionally rampant opening batsman. For every person out there calling for him to be dropped there’s another telling everyone to leave him alone, he single-handedly won a World Cup quarter final after all.

There’s a very good reason for the paradox there. He’s both a great batsman and a decidedly average one. He is each of those things. In the latest Blackcaps squad, Guppy’s finally been given the flick from the test team to play Pakistan after a 16-match run following almost exactly two years out of the test scene. Plenty will see that as long overdue having watched The Gupmeister fumble at balls outside off stump for way too long now.

But here’s the thing: Guptill is a world class ODI player. Test matches, sure, he’s got a few problems that it doesn’t look like he’ll overcome in a hurry. In ODIs though, there are few better.

Which is a big part of the frustration of his test career, as people have looked at him pummelling buggers into the stands, stepping into that straight drive and lifting it all the way over the bowler’s head and a long way further than that too. They see that and ponder: ‘why can’t he do this in the test arena too?’ Maybe he needs to be more aggressive against the red ball. Maybe there’s a technical thing he could be working on more. Or… maybe he’s just an ODI player? It never did Chris Harris or Kyle Mills too much harm.

The issue with that is players really want to play the longform stuff. It’s the peak of the sport and professional pride dictates that it’s within the realm of test match cricket that the greats of the game are born and bred. Plus it’s not like there’s a rulebook to how you’ve gotta play in test matches. Despite the long shadow of fellas like Boycott (and even M.H. Richardson within these shores), blokes like Chris Gayle and Virender Sehwag were magnificent test players. And in New Zealand there’s also a shortage of cricketers that can compete with the best of what other nations can offer, which has earned Guptill plenty of time to make his case. It’s in everyone’s best interests for Guptill to be a top drawer test player. It just hasn’t happened.

MARTY THE TEST MATCH BATSMAN

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Three centuries in 47 test matches is not in any way cool for an opening batsman. Now, Guptill hasn’t always been an opener but that argument doesn’t get much traction because that 189 he scored came in the five slot against Bangladesh at home back in 2010. His average in the opening spots is 27.49 and when you’ve played as much cricket as he has (89 innings – 64 as an opener) then that’s just not good enough. A good test match opener ought to average over 40. If you’ve got a strong middle order (as NZ has had for a lot of Gup’s career with Kane/Ross/B-Mac) then dining in crazy runs isn’t as essential so long as you can lay the platform for them. An average under 30 is not doing that. Nor is bagging more than three times as many ducks as tons.

64 test innings as an opener is an interesting place to lay a comparison, since the guy that all Blackcaps openers are held in reference over the last decade has been Mark Richardson. He played exactly 65 innings in his career, a decent chunk less than Guptill overall and yet take a glance at this next lot.

Rigor scored 2776 runs at an average of 44.77 with 4 hundreds and 19 fifties. One more ton and two extra fiddies than Guppy and the average is more than 15 runs better off. Richardson didn’t get out cheaply. He had one duck his entire test career, a four-baller against the West Indies at Bridgetown in 2002. He also had a penchant for scoring big fifties that weren’t converted into hundies, which skews the numbers slightly. A 99 against Zimbabwe in his second test. A 95 in the test following his lone duck. An 89 against India at Wellington. 93 at Lords vs England (he tonned in the second innings). But this is the point to really focus on over here.

Percentage of innings dismissed <20 runs:

Mark Richardson – 32.3%
Martin Guptill – 57.3%

Not ideal, that. Another point would be that Guptill’s three centuries came against Bangladesh (at home - 189), Zimbabwe (away - 109) and Sri Lanka (at home, 156). And in his last stint in the team, about an 18 month period as the test opener, he averaged 28.93 which is no better than the rest of his career, really. You can see why the patience eventually ran out. His big innings all came in favourable conditions against weaker teams, in 31 innings against Australia and South Africa he passed fifty only twice with an average lingering in the teens. In New Zealand, the average rises up into the mid-30s but all that says is that as much as that number rises above his career mark, that’s how far his away numbers sink below it.

Funny thing, Guptill’s three tons all came in the first innings of test matches, where his average was up at 46.24. Makes sense that an opening bat would thrive at a time where their captain has explicitly decided that now is the best time to bat but then he also tonned up twice after having lost the toss and been sent in. Oh yeah, but they were against Bangladesh and Sri Lanka and both at home. He also has a career mark of 18.06 when batting in fourth innings.

There’s nothing there to suggest that this is a batsman worth sticking with for another few years in such a key position. Tom Latham has come in and he’s already scored 5 centuries with 10 fifties in 47 innings, with an average of exactly 38.00. It was over 40 for a spell but that South Africa/India winter tour was pretty damaging for most lads that travelled.

Latham also averages well in the first innings of tests, 50.07 in fact. But then he also scores 42.58 in the second innings. He scores runs, that’s what he does – whether his team is setting a total or trying to improve on one. Although… he could do better in his second visits to the crease, averaging 27.90 in his team’s subsequent attempts at bat. Which, by the way, is not far off from Guptill’s overall career figure. His <20 thingy sits at 44.7%, gently in between Rigor’s and Guppy’s.

So yeah, Latham is stabilising the opening spot and Guptill hasn’t taken his chance to form a partnership there. 30 times the pair have batted together, with an average of 40.23 for the partnership, including 3 triple-figure knocks. To be honest, that’s better than we’ve been used to, but who’s carrying who is the worry. Guptill can’t complain that he’s been dropped, not based on all this.

However. Going into the ODI series against India, there seemed to be a real consensus that Guptill was out of form. It was a narrative sprayed all over the kiwi sports media, that Gup was really short on runs and we couldn’t expect him to go cashing in. As it happened, he had a poor series, getting only one decent score – a 72 in the fourth match. There were two ducks amidst. Yet that was almost entirely based on his test match form and as expressed above, his test match form wasn’t in a downturn… that’s the same player we’ve seen his entire test career. If anything, he was just being consistent.

In ODIs he’s a completely different prospect. Guptill is an outstanding shortform player to the point where you really need to look at his test/not-test careers as entirely separate things. There’s Guptill the test player and there’s Guptill the limited overs player. Before the India series, he’d gone 18 innings in a row without being dismissed in single figures – including 3 tons and 8 fifties. That’s absolutely brilliant, which is where this chap comes into the reckoning…

MARTY THE ODI BATSMAN

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Whereas Guppy the Test Batsman has never really established himself, Guppy the ODI Batsman went and scored 122* on debut against the Windies and has carried on from there. It’d be quite a while before he tonned up for the second time, 105 vs ZIM in Harare, but he was never out of the side having played at least 11 ODIs in every calendar year since his debut in 2009.

At one stage around that second hundred, Guptill had five consecutive scores all over 70 – all five of them in games against Zimbabwe too. Ah but it was the tour to England in 2013 where he really emerged, scoring back to back tons at Lords and Southampton, including 189* in the latter. From that point on we knew we were working with a batsman who could absolutely pillage on his day, a rare kinda talent. There was a period where he struggled to recapture that formula of those innings, where he’d started slowly to set himself up and then gone ballistic towards the end and what that gave us was a horrible time where he’d be scoring 2 off 17 balls, 16 of 35, 11 off 29, that sorta stuff. Not turning the strike over and leaving the ball way too regularly. Yet when he stayed in past the point of getting comfortable, he’d still be able to overhaul the initial hesitancy with a flurry of boundary assaults.

Then 2015 arrived. It was a scratchy start for him, with three ducks (comprising a total of four deliveries faced) in the seven-game series against Sri Lanka before he got a few runs against Pakistan. Then the World Cup arrived. 49 against Sri Lanka in the opener, 57 against Afghanistan after a few failures. Then a massive innings, scoring 105 against Bangladesh to get the kiwis over the line despite the cheap wickets of McCullum and Williamson in that one. If you thought he was feeling it there, you’d be correct. This is what followed.

That’s still the second highest ODI score in history. 237* with 24 fours and 11 sixes. Records all over the place – including topping his own NZ record of 189 in an innings. One of six double centuries in ODI cricket, one of five men to have scored one. And he kept on scoring for the rest of the year, with hundreds against Zimbabwe and South Africa, plus another against Sri Lanka at the start of 2016.

Since the beginning of 2015 he’s scored 2002 runs at an average of 51.33. An unbeaten double ton helps that average but it’s only a fraction of the total runs there. Five tons, 12 fifties. That’s 170 runs more than the next highest aggregate scorer in that time and that’d be his teammate Kane Williamson. Dave Warner and Steve Smith are on 1741 and 1723, Hashim Amla is fifth with 1573 runs, followed by AB de Villiers’ 1532 and Joe Root’s 1519. These are the best batsmen in the world. ODI Guppy shouldn’t only be compared to the best in the country but the best fullstop.

More 100s than Guppy since 1 Jan 2015 (5):

DA Warner (7)
HM Amla (6)
AB de Villiers (6)

Just those three. Meanwhile here are the total times past 50 since the start of 2015:

MJ Guptill – 17
KS Williamson – 16
F du Plessis – 15
JE Root – 15
SDP Smith – 15
DA Warner – 13
AD de Villiers – 12
HM Amla – 11
AJ Finch – 11
EJG Morgan – 11
RG Sharma – 11

Guptill does have the advantage of being a New Zealander in this regard. NZ Cricket have shown they prefer the cash windfall of an extra couple one-dayers to another test match so NZ does tend to play quite a few of them. With that, his 44 innings over this span are also the most of anyone, with Steve Smith next on 39 and Williamson following with 38 – two international captains there. So how about the averages then? Yeah, here we go (minimum 20 innings):

AB de Villiers – 66.60 // 28 inns
DA Warner – 56.16 // 34 inns
RG Sharma – 55.16 // 27 inns
V Kohli – 54.14 // 30 inns
F du Plessis – 54.14 // 33 inns
Shoaib Malik – 54.11 // 24 inns
LRPL Taylor – 51.91 // 32 inns
MJ Guptill – 51.33 // 44 inns
KS Williamson – 50.88 // 38 inns
JE Root – 50.63 // 32 inns

Obviously he falls back into the pack a little with the averages, but nobody’s calling him the best batsman in the world… just one of them. De Villiers has scored his runs these last 23 months at a strike-rate of 123.64, so yeah. Guppy’s at 96.85 which is still outstanding. And you know it could be argued that having a slightly lower average than most of the above dudes yet sustaining that over a longer period is a greater achievement.

All those things that littered his test figures, they’re not evident in his ODI ones. His average is about nine points better at home than away but it’s still a hugely respectable 39.67 out of NZ and his centuries are split evenly between them. Similarly he averages over 40 for his career whether he’s batting first or chasing, and again with five tons for each. In day-nighters his numbers drop off a bit however he’s scored runs against all the major teams at one time or another.

Perhaps tellingly, he also averaged 48.68 while batting under Brendon McCullum’s captaincy. Plenty of those matches would have come with B-Mac swinging the blade at the other end too, which is bound to help a couple things. He’s only at 36.45 under Prince Kane although you can expect those numbers to rise with a home summer on the horizon – with six ODIs on the cards against Aussie (three here and three there), three ODIs against Bangladesh and another five against South Africa before the ICC Champions Trophy in June.

Look, that’s the dilemma with Guptill. You watch him struggle in a test series and wonder how the hell he’ll survive in the ODIs then he goes and dominates and you wonder why he couldn’t do that in the tests. At the moment he’s out of the test side and thus freed from that vicious cycle but this is still New Zealand and he’s already scoring Plunket Shield runs. He’ll be back, more likely than not. And when he does get back, try not to hold his ODI form against his test stuff… and vice versa. There are two Martin Guptills.

It’s better this way.