It wasn’t until JRod pointed out that Mitchell has better figures than Anderson that I got to thinking a statistical analysis could be insightful on the bowlers in this series to date. I’ve uploaded my working here if you want to take a look in Excel.

Mitchell Johnson is in terrible form, you can read about it here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and according to google there are 520 more such stories here.

However, when one looks at aggregated bowling figures, Johnson has 8 wickets and is just trailing Hauritz (9) and Hilfenhaus (9) for series honours.

Mithcell’s bowling average of 41.38 looks terrible, until you consider the roads prepared to date and observe that he’s ranked 5th best in the series, ahead of JM Anderson (42.1), PM Siddle (45.1), GP Swann (56.1), SCJ Broad (64.1), MS Panesar (115.1) and all the part timers.

Johnno’s overall economy rate is poor at 4.00, with just Collingwood (4.47) and Onions (4.55) returning inferior resutls. Still, I haven’t read too many stories calling for Onions to be chopped.

On paper his bowling to date is more than acceptable, it’s impressive. He’s taken 8 out of 34 English wickets, namely Strauss, Cook (twice), Bopara, Flintoff, Prior, Broad (on 19) and Anderson (on 29) so there’s no ‘soft’ ones padding his stats, unlike SuperFred.

Are we asking too much of a guy who’s had the ‘spearhead’ label placed on him after 3 good spells and an injury to Lee? If we’re going to drop any bowler for Clark to come in then Siddle should be first in line.