45 missed chances in 15 tests since England Series at home in 2012

[saneindian]

The massive number of dropped catches in this series prompted me to look for the total number of catches we have missed in last 15-16 months. And the stats I found are shocking though not unexpected. We have missed 45 chances (missed catches and stumping and some easy runouts) in these 15 tests!! (Edges falling short due to Dhoni standing too deep have not been counted)

• In the series in NZ, total 10 chances have been missed with Mccullum alone being let off 6 times!
• Did better in SA, with just 3 missed chances
• Vs WI at home, 7 chances were missed
• Vs Aus at home, 13 chances were missed!
• In the home series vs England, we missed 12 chances with KP getting 4 of those and Cook 3.

Culprits

• Not unexpectedly Dhoni is the biggest culprit of them all missing 16 of these 45 missed chances , ~35%.
• Pujara has missed 5, Sehwag and Vijay 4 each , Kohli and Ashwin 3 each!

Suffering Bowlers

• Ashwin has had 12 catches dropped off his bowling, Ojha 8 and Jadeja suffering 5 times. Zaheer, Shami and Ishant have had 4 chances each missed of their bowling.

A young side, a specialist fielding coach yet the problem continues to worsen. Batting or bowling can still have excuses , no reason why we should be so poor in the catching department. And not unexpectedly, here too problem begins at the top with Dhoni's shoddy keeping P.S I tried to upload the excel file but it seems the format is invalid for upload. Will try to put each of these chances (from CI match commentary pages) in the thread

[G_B_]

terrible... whats the reason behind this? We have a good fielding unit.

[Ultimate_Game]

You can't hope to win much with an average of 3 dropped chances a Test, especially given our lack of bowling firepower. @OP how did you get these stats? Does cricinfo track missed chances as well?

[Yoda-esque]

Batting is shaping up OK,need a good wrist spinner and one bowler who is fast and accurate and we should be good The difference might look huge but in fact it is purely to do with balance.

[FischerTal]

New captain anyone?

[G_B_]

this is a coaching issue to be frank. I think Pujara fields at short leg etc so many of his catches have been hard chances. I remember kohli dropping sitters though. In this case i wont blame Dhoni. The coaching team need to sort this out.

[saneindian]

You can't hope to win much with an average of 3 dropped chances a Test, especially given our lack of bowling firepower. @OP how did you get these stats? Does cricinfo track missed chances as well?

CI Match pages have archives of ball by ball commentary for recent matches. Took about 35-40 minutes of manual effort going through each of those pages and searching keywords like dropped chances, Missed chance, missed stumping etc. Will keep updating this log from now on. Or may be create one mega thread and update that with all our dropped catches, missed run outs etc.

[zep1706]

Batting is shaping up OK,need a good wrist spinner and one bowler who is fast and accurate and we should be good The difference might look huge but in fact it is purely to do with balance.

A change of captain is mandatory if we want results outside the SC.

[Soorma_Bhopali]

A change of captain is mandatory if we want results outside the SC.

+1 ..We need a new test captain

[Laaloo]

+1 ..We need a new test captain

and a new t20 captain as well

[Silva]

And yet people talk about kohli being an elite fielder. I heard Ugra talking about how in IPL kohli dropped an easy catch that went right through his hands and hit him in the chest and the chamcha commentators talked about it being a half chance. Our guys are way too coddled compared to other teams.

[gaurav92]

Pujara as test captain. T20s - Well Kohli might be good there.

[Chandan]

CI Match pages have archives of ball by ball commentary for recent matches. Took about 35-40 minutes of manual effort going through each of those pages and searching keywords like dropped chances, Missed chance, missed stumping etc. Will keep updating this log from now on. Or may be create one mega thread and update that with all our dropped catches, missed run outs etc.

That would be awesome! I think Dhoni is suffering from excessive workload. He needs to think seriously now as India will play many away tests this year. He can concentrate on ODI &T20 captaincy and leave the tests to the younger side. Pujara has not only the experience of captaining his state side but he has captained India at A level too. India needs to find a new keeper/batsman.

[Ultimate_Game]

CI Match pages have archives of ball by ball commentary for recent matches. Took about 35-40 minutes of manual effort going through each of those pages and searching keywords like dropped chances, Missed chance, missed stumping etc. Will keep updating this log from now on. Or may be create one mega thread and update that with all our dropped catches, missed run outs etc.

:hatsoff: I could never understand why stats related to run-outs and missed chances are not tracked in cricket. Baseball tracks errors and related stats and there's no reason why cricket shouldn't do that. If Player A has effected 6 runouts and hasn't missed a chance, whereas Player B has effected 2 runouts and dropped 4 catches, you would want to pick Player A if their batting or bowling is in the same ballpark.

[Crookbond]

Forget the Indian team, can we give the OP some kind of an award please? Commitment hai bhaai! Saneindian - Please write a blog on this and submit it to Cricinfo. I am sure it will get published. Vamos_Rafa works out there - if that doesn't get you through I can connect through one of my contacts. Let me know what you think.