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Cricket’s newest metric

Vijay Krishnan13 March 2026|

Cricket has embraced data, especially since the advent of modern T20 cricket, both to analyse performances and in many cases to gain a tactical edge over opposition teams. However, one statistic that I have seen missing from mainstream cricket is ‘expected runs’ – that is to say, a measure of how many runs a batter should score off any given ball, on average. The idea is that if a batter has scored more runs than expected, they have played particularly well; and if they have scored less than expected, then their run total is flattering their actual performance. By no means is this a novel idea: metrics like expected goals (xG) have become a staple in football, and it’s about