Boundary percentage flatters the batter who cannot rotate strike

A high share of runs from fours and sixes often marks a player with no other way of scoring at all.

There is a statistic that gets used as a compliment and ought to be read as a warning. Boundary percentage, the share of a batter's runs arriving in fours and sixes, is quoted as proof of power. Often it is proof of a player who cannot find the gaps and has given up looking.

Think about what a very high figure requires. If eighty per cent of your runs come from boundaries, the balls in between are producing almost nothing, which means dots. In a twenty-over innings that is fine only while the boundaries keep coming. The moment a captain pushes the ring back on a slow pitch and takes the pace off, a boundary-dependent batter has no second gear. He has one shot and a wall of fielders standing exactly where it goes.

Compare him with a player at sixty per cent who turns the rest into ones and twos. He scores off more balls. He denies the bowler a settled line because the strike keeps changing. He drags fielders around, and two hard-run twos in an over move the square-leg fielder five yards, and those five yards are where the next boundary comes from. Rotation is not the safe option. It is the thing that manufactures the boundary somebody else gets credited for.

Where the metric earns its keep is the last four overs, when there is no time to build anything and a dot costs more than a dismissal. A finisher with a huge boundary share in that window is doing exactly the job he was hired for. Judging him on strike rotation would be daft. Context is the whole argument, as usual.

My real objection is what the number does to young players. It is easy to measure, it looks tremendous on a highlight reel, and academy batters understand perfectly well that the reel is what gets them noticed. So they practise the shots that produce it and skip the ugly work of hitting into a gap and sprinting the second.

Watch which batters in a franchise side turn one into two on a big square boundary. It is usually two of them. It should be seven.