How's stat? Why head-to-head battles only add to the rich tapestry of Test cricket drama

Let's start, as all bad pieces of writing should, with a cliche: cricket is an individual sport dressed as a team game. Every match comprises hundreds or thousands of contests between a batter and a bowler.

- Rob Smyth

That unusual gameplay is one of the main reasons why Test cricket, in particular, touches the parts L other sports cannot reach. But never mind all that soulful, meaning-of-life stuff; we're here to talk about the joys of the humble statgasm.

Ever since doing a statistical preview of the 200203 Ashes for Wisden Cricket Monthly, an impossibly glamorous commission for a budding anorak hack, I have been fascinated by head-to-head averages, especially in Test cricket. Mano a mano and all that.

My research showed Ricky Ponting, Australia's best player at the time, had larruped 169 runs off 176 balls from Andrew Caddick without being dismissed, but that against Darren Gough he had been out eight times at a head-to-head average of 16. Before we could send an urgent memo to the England captain Nasser Hussain, Gough pulled out of the tour with an injury.

Thankfully for those with a certain neurology, this kind of data never gets old. In the course of writing a monthly feature for Wisden Cricket Monthly, using CricViz's database to look at history through a different lens, I researched who had the best Test record against the great West Indies quicks of the 1970s, 80s and 90s. Suprisingly, top of the list was a limited-overs trailblazer who was dropped from the Test team for the final time before a series against West Indies in 1992.