Highest Career Strike Rates for Stokers

This week’s “Ask Steven” column on CricInfo had a question raised about Strike Rates.

Highest ODI Strike Rates - CricInfo

Looking at our own stats, to the end of the 2017 season 74 Stokers have scored more than 2000 runs for the Club…only three have a career Strike Rate of over 100.00:

Navid Hussain : 110.01 (2428 career runs)
Tim Handel : 105.76 (4559)
Frank Moore : 101.25 (2835)

The full table is here : SDCC Strike Rates (Min 2000 Runs) All Time

A couple of disclaimers, though : Play Cricket only carries strike rates where the number of balls faced are entered on to a scorecard, and the system applies that as an overall career strike rate; so in the old days when this wasn’t such a well-kept stat in scorebooks, sometimes players only had a ‘balls faced’ entered where it could be worked out that they were out in, say, the early overs of a match, or we could see they were dismissed early when it could be seen in the scorebook that wickets fell in quick succession.

Two players to suffer from this glitch are Dave Willis and Ian Lipscombe who certainly would not have accumulated the runs they did for the club at strike rates of less than 15 runs per 100 balls! (Sorry, boys!)

Adrian Black and Ollie Hood have no scorecards with balls faced against their names so appear at the bottom of the list. Adrian’s numbers would have been interesting as he had the potential to score his runs quickly, although he was also very patient when the match situation dictated; so we are confident that the Navid, Timmy and Frank are the only three. (The biggest beneficiary of the glitch is Neal Heaton who has a recorded strike rate of 475.00!)

Some more realistic numbers for players who have some amazing strike rates in shorter careers are Jeremy Beckwith who took time out from umpiring our Saturday 1st XI matches to bludgeon his Sunday runs for us at 215.00 runs per 100 balls; Greg Routley, (1443 runs / 131.69 strike rate – inc 84 sixes), Johnny Lawes, (1774 / 128.90), Andy Berry, (1030 / 102.53) and Roger Bowman, (1023 / 140.00), have all scored more than 1000 runs at better than a run-a-ball.

Jerry Hinds, (150.98), and Anthony Alleyne, (139.86), are two others who scored very quickly in a handful of competitive games; and in his one season so far Shawn Dyson has scored his runs at 113.97. Ed Ashwell currently has a career strike rate of 125.56.

Stephen Anderson struck his 799 runs for Stoke at 121.76, a better strike rate than at his current club, (Godalming), where he has scored 1033 runs for them at a rate of 115.59 runs per 100 balls.

In Women’s cricket the Stoke Molesey Ladies and the Stoke Women’s 1st XI players scored their runs quickly; notably:

Claire Trafford : 135.20 runs per 100 balls (882 career runs including a top score of 213 not out.)
Nat Sciver : 130.79 (795 runs)
Sophie Pout : 125.84 (1710 runs)

Amy Page has a Club career strike rate of 86.78, a figure dented due to some successful match-saving knocks in men’s cricket. Her strike rate for the Stoke Molesey Ladies is currently 119.91, (803 runs – batting average 133.83), and she also had a strike rate of 82.79, (890 runs), for the old Stoke Women’s 1st XI.

As with all these features, if you have any comments or queries, e-mail stokecc@hotmail.com