The rise and fall of Aaron Finch's strike rate
A closer look at his year-on-year stats across both white-ball formats reveal a distinct decline in his strike rate for some time now, which seems to suggest that an upturn in form is unlikely.
Despite this, and whatever the near future has in store, Aaron Finch is still sure to go down as one of Australia’s white-ball greats.
The past two years have seen Finch face pulsating waves of criticism due to his relatively poor returns in both ODIs and T20Is. Last year's T20 World Cup victory under his captaincy somewhat silenced those voices or, at least, sidelined them, but his particularly poor numbers this year brought them back to the fore.
Last week he announced his retirement from ODIs, bringing an end to conjecture about his future in that format. After being selected to lead Australia in the T20 World Cup in October and November this year, and also confirming his intent to stay on in the shortest format of the international game, it seems very unlikely that Finch won’t play at the World Cup and, indeed, in the (remarkably many) nine T20I matches Australia have prior to starting their World Cup campaign proper on October 22nd.
Therefore, the real question seems to be whether he will stay on in the T20 format beyond the World Cup.
Looking at Finch’s form across both white-ball formats over the years, there are some statistical clues as to which way his performance has been trending for some time now. An interesting similarity can be seen in the decline of his strike rate in the last few calendar years in both the 20- and 50-over versions of the game.
The numbers speak of a man in the late autumn of his career, hurtling towards a frosty winter.
Let’s take a closer look at the rise and fall of Aaron Finch's strike rate. A cricket strike rate (SR) represents the average number of runs a batters scores per 100 balls faced. The higher the strike rate, the quicker a batter tends to score. In limited-overs cricket, SR is a key statistical metric of a batter's impact and performance.
ODIs - a Strike Rate in Decline
Finch deciding to step away from ODI cricket after the Chappel-Hadlee series was by no means a shock to the cricket-supporting public in Australia or around the world. In the back-to-back North Queensland series just finished, against first Zimbabwe and then New Zealand, Finch returned scores in order of (balls faced in brackets): 15 (21), 1 (6), 5 (11), 5 (4), 0 (2) and 5 (13).
These would be staggeringly poor numbers for any batsman across six consecutive innings but especially so when it is the team’s captain and former talisman, who cut a rather forlorn figure up in the tropics, trudging largely run-less to and from the pavilions.
In 2022, Finch played 14 ODIs, recording five ducks and averaging just 12. In this calendar year, he scored just one 50-plus score (62 against Sri Lanka in June). If you remove that outlier innings, he averaged just 8.6 across 13 innings for the year.
At a glance, these figures read terribly. But when did it all go wrong for Finch, one of the most destructive batters of his generation?
His career record of 5,406 runs at an average of just under 39 and a strike rate of 87.7 in 146 ODIs is pretty impressive. It ranks him 14th in the all-time list of ODI runscorers for Australia and his 17 ODI centuries are the fourth most in Australian history.
To give you some context for just how productive he was, Mark Waugh scored 18 centuries (just one more) in almost 100 more matches than Finch.
Finch didn’t play an ODI in 2021. However, his 2020 figures were eye-catching. In fact, 2020 was one of Finch’s best years in his whole ODI career. He scored over 800 runs at an average of 56, his highest calendar-year average. By these figures alone, it seems like 2022 represents a stark drop-off in form for Finch and not a gradual fall from grace.
But while his 2020 numbers were very impressive, there is one pertinent trend that sticks out in Finch’s year-on-year stats in ODIs. His run-making was pretty consistent but his SR saw a steady decline over the last six years of his career.
To be more specific, in 2016 he was striking the ball at 94, but his SR has dropped consistently over the years to 93 (in 2017), 89 (in both 2018 and 2019), 82 (in 2020) and then right down to just 71 this year. Where the weight of runs he scored in 2020 might suggest that he wasn’t declining, this steadily sinking SR proves that cracks were appearing in Finch’s ODI performances for some time.
T20Is - a Similar Slide
Finch’s T20I career bears some interesting and expected resemblances to his ODI one, despite his career numbers in the former being even more impressive than in the latter. He is currently the highest T20I run scorer in Australia’s history - the fifth-highest in the history of the format. Across 92 matches, he has scored 2,855 runs at an average of 35 with a SR of 145.
To give you some context to those numbers, that’s a better average than Rohit Sharma's (32), a higher SR than Virat Kohli's (138) and better figures than David Warner in all categories (runs, average, and SR). This is truly praiseworthy and probably enough alone to justify Finch’s retention as T20I captain through to the end of the upcoming World Cup.
What is interesting though, looking at his year-on-year T20I numbers, is that there is a similar drop-off in his SR in the latter half of his career just like in his ODI stats.
2018 was a stand-out year for Finch in T20Is. By the end of that year, he had played exactly 50 T20Is and since then he has played another 42. This is a convenient mid-point marker in his career and one that lines up with a statistically interesting trend as well.
In 2018, in 17 T20I matches, Finch averaged 41 and was striking at the huge SR of 176. These are formidable numbers. But since then, his SR has steadily diminished to 158 (in 2019), 139 (in 2020), 125 (in 2021) and then down to 122 (in 2022). This tail-off is fascinating for its consistency and it mirrors nicely his ODI SR decline, albeit starting a little later (2018 compared to 2016).
From Decline to Slide to The End is Nigh
To put it simply, the last four or five calendar years have seen Finch wane as a batter in one of the key performance metrics in international white-ball cricket: strike rate.
Whilst some of his other numbers and the 2021 World Cup win added fuel to the arguments to retain him in international limited-overs cricket, we can see a steady decline in an aspect of his game that he hasn’t been able to halt for some time now across both formats. But why?
Maybe this is the result of increased and better analysis allowing bowlers to figure him out quicker, identify his weaknesses and then target them. Perhaps it's due to a degradation in his technique, footwork or even fitness.
Or maybe this is all as simple as a man ageing and losing his eye, losing that little extra something, that je ne sais quoi which separates the merely good from the truly great.
Whatever the reason, Finch gradually dipped from one of the most feared batsmen in the world to the point where he bore barely tenable numbers in both ODIs and T20Is. His retirement from the former format of the game is thus unsurprising and timely. On the other hand, his retention in the latter form is understandable, for now at least, due to his status in the pantheon of great T20 batsmen.
Sticking with him for this World Cup is reasonable but if the numbers discussed tell us anything, they suggest that Finch’s form doesn't look like turning a corner any time soon. The rise of Finch was something spectacular but the fall of his strike rate reeks of the end.
Perhaps one last hurrah at the World Cup could be on the cards. You never know! With his record, you wouldn’t put it past him turning up and tearing it up.
What’s more, you certainly wouldn’t begrudge the man one last dance in front of his home fans to cap off, or even extend, what has already been a remarkable career.