Northamptonshire Cricket League · Premier Division
A bowling average that prices each wicket by the batsman who lost it, so a top-order scalp counts for more than a tail-end one. 2026 season, to 5 September.
Minimum qualification: 15 wickets in the season, and at least 10 of them tied to a Premier scorecard. 36 bowlers clear it.
| # | In type | Bowler | Type | W | Raw | Adjusted | Δ | Wicket quality (1.00 = average) | Move |
|---|
An even split, 18 apiece. The spinners took more wickets — 440 to 363 — but of measurably cheaper batsmen: quality 0.969 against seam's 1.020. That gap is precisely what a raw average hides. Adjust for it and the two disciplines finish level, 20.52 to 20.37.
Every batsman gets a value from his 2023–2026 Premier record, shrunk toward the division mean so that a man with three innings is not treated as a known quantity: (runs + 9 × mean) / (dismissals + 9).
A bowler's wickets are then averaged into a single quality figure, and his raw average is divided by it. Weights are normalised so the league-wide effect is zero — the adjustment reallocates credit between bowlers rather than flattering everyone.
A bowler's own dismissals of a batsman are excluded when valuing that batsman, so nobody can talk down the price of his own victims.
Minimum qualification is 15 wickets, plus at least 10 tied to a Premier scorecard. The bar is there for sample size: below roughly 15 wickets a bowler's quality figure turns on two or three dismissals and moves about too much to rank. It was set before anyone's position was known, and moving it changes who appears, never anyone's adjusted average.
Weights come from batting averages alone. Conditions, match situation and who was bowling at the other end are all invisible to it.
Every wicket in the 75 matches that produced a scorecard is priced, and the capture inside those matches is exact. Five further fixtures — the 29 August round, abandoned league-wide — count as played but published no scorecard, so their wickets are absent here. Two rounds, 12 and 19 September, are still to be played.
The league's own season totals run higher than the sum of its Premier scorecards, because the division filter also sweeps in appearances from outside Premier league fixtures. Those are excluded here by construction: a wicket is priced only if it appears on a Premier scorecard. The two bowlers marked † have a smaller share of their season wickets tied to one, so their quality figure rests on a thinner sample.